Microsoft completes $69B deal to buy Activision Blizzard | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft completes $69B deal to buy Activision Blizzard

theguardian.com

335 pointsbeardyw576 comments

I keep my fingers crossed for the revival of the StarCraft franchise. I grew up with the game, and it's kinda sad to see the current state of SC2: old bugs, new bugs, community trying to take over the processes but having a very bumpy ride, opaque decision making (de-facto spokespersons/community figures under muddy NDAs), and unfortunately all our 2010 fears (no local/LAN play!) coming true, when server outages are hitting during in-person tournaments.

SC2 is still the best RTS there is. Immortal, Stormgate, and ZeroSpace are all showing great promise, but none of these is even at the public alpha stage. So SC2, with all of its problems, it is.

Age of Empire is thriving under microsoft, its not biggest esports out there but the game is pretty stable and receiving seemingly endless content updates

I expect starcraft would be the same, maybe cant go back to it former glory but atleast it would be alive especially if make it to gamepass

Not only is AoEII doing really well under Microsoft, it's doing so despite taking a couple of goes to get it right in the modern era. Most other companies would have given up when HD edition got a bit of a middling response.

I really wish they would update Rise of Nations, which MS also published. Obviously not as popular, but I loved the tech tree and the territory system.

As a StarCraft 2 fan, I’m actually quite happy with the current game balance. The last two rounds of balance patches from the community were far better for the playability and fun of the game. It was alarming when Blizzard cut funding for GSL and it looked like the Korean scene was practically done, but Afreeca and the community pulled together and kept that prize pool interesting enough for the Korean pros.

I'm glad the age of proxy void rays and queen walks is gone, but there's a lot to be desired from the process. My main grievance is that the community members who form the balance council are under some insane NDA, they're afraid of even discussing what is in the NDA, let alone what they're working on.

You end up with a design by committee with minimal community input, which feeds the cycle back into balance whine shitposts and YT reaction videos. It's arguably better than nothing, but far from healthy.

I miss David Kim.

The description of the DNA by Harstem in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYxQ9qfftk8 doesn't sound that insane.

Glad to hear the GSL and pro scene still lives on. 2011-12 SC2 was the first esport that I followed. Plenty of good memories from those days, like the GSL final with the Archon toilet.

I rediscovered Brood War during Covid (free to play). 99% of matchups I lost. But there was one 4+ hour 1v1 marathon on a huge map. Lost that one too but what an incredible game. So many comebacks on both sides. So close. Matching skills is key to a GG.

Brood War is incredibly tough for newcomers. Skill-wise, the mid-F rank (barely above the rock bottom) is the equivalent of SC2's low diamond (roughly middle of the playerbase) - people are either this good, or drop out.

If you're looking for a more fair match, and don't mind SC2 being a very different game, you should give it a try. If you can max out on literally anything before 15:00 and a-move your opponent, you will probably get a 50% winrate.

SC2's matching engine and ladder is designed to generate ~50% win rates among players of all skill levels.

Same for BW, same for chess, that's basically how ELO/MMR works. The very bottom (and the very top) of the ladder of course have a skew, there are people who are so bad (or so good) that the ladder can't find anyone worse (better) than them and get less than (or more than) 50% winrate. It's just that the skill floor for BW is so damn high.

Brood war path finding can be rough to adjust to, even if you played SC2.

I wish star craft had a "scatter" button to space out your units like command and conquer has (its been a decade but I think the button is X). Maybe even some formation options to avoid everyone packing in a tight ball where the move command is issued. AOE is so lethal in SC I think it hurts the gameplay.

Its a safety issue as well. Pro terrans often have wrist issues from splitting their units. With the other races it isn't as crucial, but still an issue.

Age of Empires has been very well maintained, even restored. It has a pretty large player base 20 years after release. It would be cool to see the same happen with Starcraft

The SC2 professional scene is doing really well I think. Lots of games being played at the highest levels. And tons of content for it on YouTube with some of the best play by play commentators out there. I really enjoy that.

What deep pocketed Microsoft could do is really up the ante and make the prize money for tournaments of say Quake (they own ID) or SC2 and others really high and attract even more buzz etc etc.

I just hope these games and IP don’t just become afterthoughts. Will we get a demonic hell on earth new doom game? Will we get an even more hellish Diablo game? Will we get a SC3?

With all these game studios under one roof I wonder how many games will get axed in the pursuit of “synergies”?

> The SC2 professional scene is doing really well I think

I could easily claim the opposite. There's very little to no mention of SC2 for Blizzcon '23 as well.

That sucks. I didn’t know that.

Hoping that Microsoft does something with sc2

Good luck to SC2. I hope they're smart enough not to touch SCBW and leave it as is.

RTS is such a great genre. I know everyone loved StarCraft but I enjoyed Warcraft II and 3 more… along with C&C, Red Alert and Age of Empires. Not sure why.

Warcraft 3 was a great balance between micro and macro management due to the Hero concept. SC always just felt like a game of numbers… but I am sure I just wasn’t as experienced.

Regardless I would love it if the genre stayed alive and I am glad Age is continually updated and stable.

Ah, sweet memories of Helm's Deep on WC3 Bnet

Wow, I completely forgot about Red Alert. That game was a blast!

Chew on this!!

Awaiting orders.

Affirmative!

What a gem.

Right? And that soundtrack! I could listen to Hell March without the game. They actually released the full soundtrack as a CD.

I recently found an open source version that has been fun (https://www.openra.net/).

Ms bought Nokia - out of business

Ms bought Skype - useless as Zoom won the Covid era

MS bought Lynda.com- who?

MS bought LinkedIn- does anyone pay $90 a month to use it?

MS bought Danger - the best tactical keyboard mobile phone. DEAD

MS bought Halo vr system a $3509 pos that never got an update

Ms buys stuff , never making stuff.

I live near Linkedin HQ, and judging by their MASSIVE number of sprawling headquarters buildings, quite a few people do pay to use it

> does anyone pay $90 a month to use it?

Some do apparently

LinkedIn is probably the only one that don’t belong on that list.

Who made/makes VSCode?

VSCode was an in house MS project

Wasn't the initial codebase github atom? So, about as in house as edge2 (the current one) is.

VSCode was released several years before the github acquisition, and is unrelated to atom.

Linkedin is used by every recruiter.Most of the recruiters pay. It has captured most of employment traffic

And enterprise sales teams use it a ton as well.

LinkedIn serves a few purposes:

- It’s where Fortune 500 middle management networks and brags about professional accomplishments.

- Its where enterprise sales people get leads and network with those middle managers

- It’s where recruiters go to find talent of any type

And then, MS bought GitHub, OpenAI...

Hotmail, DOS, Windows NT (Dave Cutler from DEC)

I don't think NT belongs on the list as it was entirely developed in house. Sure the lead developer had designed an OS while at DEC and NT built upon his experience from that, but it was still a entirely new OS

There was no in house talent behind it. Dave already knew what he was gonna build before he arrived. Yeah, compared to the others that came in wholesale, I think NT still counts as an acquisition.

MS AI research plus big game IP is a future investment

I too delusionally hope for warcraft 4 (a good one)

Agreed, an SC3 would be potentially awesome. And I've always thought it would be interesting if they built a StarCraft MMO.

That Starcraft ghost seemed like a cool concept.

Also I wonder why "World of starcraft" never happened. Terran would play like kinda like Planetside, zerg could play like the alien team in Natural Selection, protoss like the predator in the AVP games.

My assumption for why "World of X" games didn't pan out under ActiBlizz was because Project Titan destroyed all appetite for other MMO games at Blizzard. You've got the MMO team on WoW. Are you going to split that team up to go work on MMOs for Starcraft or Diablo?

I love RTS games, but they're probably never going to achieve the level of success they have in the past. You can still make them, but like arena shooters, movement shooters, and fighting games, they really are from a different era that modern players struggle to come to terms with, and it's hard to justify risking putting a lot of money behind them. It's a shame, because I love all of these genres, but I wouldn't bet the farm on them.

There's always a chance and I hold onto hope. Baldur's Gate 3 is a CRPG with a budget way beyond what I would ever be comfortable risking on a genre that has been fairly niche in the overall video game landscape for 15+ years, and it paid off massively. However, being realistic, BG3 is a game that is strong regardless of your skill level and the other genres I've mentioned struggle with that.

> love RTS games, but they're probably never going to achieve the level of success they have in the past. You can still make them, but like arena shooters, movement shooters, and fighting games, they really are from a different era that modern players struggle to come to terms with

Interesting take. Why do you think that is? They just fallen out of fashion or something else?

Not the GP but I’ll give my take:

The long term value for an RTS is with the multiplayer. The problem is that the games are incredibly demanding to play. It takes a lot of practice and experience to get good enough to get off the “bottom rung” of the online ladder, just to be able to reach close to a 50% win rate.

Many gamers find this too stressful to deal with. They end up quitting the game and moving on to something else. This causes the “bottom rung” to move up in skill, as the weakest players leave. Since winning in these games is zero-sum it gets harder and harder to win the more weak players leave. Eventually only the most dedicated players remain, making it extremely difficult for new players to break onto the scene.

The other aspect to RTS games, the single player campaign, takes a lot of effort for the developers and designers to build. Unfortunately it has very little staying power. People play through the story maybe once with each faction and then either try out multiplayer or move on to a different game.

I think that's fairly accurate, thanks for putting it into words!

Hit the nail on the head. The execution requirements for RTS games are steep and the competition is fierce. You have to completely re-arrange your priorities from "win games" to "be better than I was last match, and I'll get there eventually", and it's something that modern audiences don't see often and struggle to engage with.

I think the other thing that is that the RTS community has de-emphasized modes other than 1v1 to the extent that it's basically a 1v1 game like fighting games. At least with MOBAs there's a destressing factor of losing with a team that stops the feeling of sole total responsibility that makes so much ladder anxiety. Similarly, arena shooters also have team deathmatch modes.

I'd say it's like this for any older game which still has a multiplayer community regardless of genre. There just isn't a big influx of new players and the bad ones give up.

That may be the case but other genres, such as shooters (first and third person), have found ways to get around it. Fortnite, for example, has nowhere near this issue whereas Quake 3 is plagued by it. The 100-player battle royale structure of Fortnite is one mechanism I think helps to mitigate the problem of overwhelming skill gap.

This kind of thing hasn't really been tested in RTS games, which usually focus on 1v1s.

Fortnite's solution has been bots, which is not very popular because plenty of people think they're above bots. Or think that bots cheat (which is true in Starcraft). Or in fighting games, they don't play like humans so you end up learning bad habits.

They didn't cheat on sc2 did they? They did in sc1. But regardless, with the breakthroughs in AI recently, I don't think they'd need to cheat on a hypothetical sc3.

I know in SC2 the harder AI would get free resources.

I think "playing like a human" can still be an issue depending on the game. Until people want to play against AIs, there's not a lot of work put into making AIs human-like rather than just AI players.

Also there still Starcraft 1 AI tournaments which are interesting. https://youtu.be/gqggsFpTAt8

Probably doesn't need to be perfectly human-like. If you want human-like, play against humans :-) Just keep it as fair as possible with the AIs.

I didn't know they were still doing SC1 AIs, I always wanted to make one but never quite figured out how to get started.

The big issue with bots is that they are almost never good enough to beat a moderately skilled and muscle-memoried human player. People who try to use them to learn don't end up being any better than a n00b, as it were.

Randomness is a big mitigator.

In MtG or LoL, a worse player than the opponent might still win 40% of games (luck of the draw or teammates), even ignoring matchmaking systems.

Players can aim for losing less over time, while still having a chance to win any particular game.

In SC or chess any chance of success against a better player is effectively zero.

I taught a friend to play multiplayer Supreme Commander. And your outlining of the "on boarding" problem is spot on. They ended up getting through it because they already where a good RTS player and I 1v1ed them for a while (didn't abliterate them every match, and slowly ramped up the difficulty while providing constructism). However most new players don't have access to 1 on 1 coaching!

RTS games are just too stressful. They require 10+ minutes of full concentration. Whether you've just won or lost an engagement, you better keep up with scouting, building your army, gathering resources, expanding your base, preparing for the next engagement, etc. You get absolutely no downtime.

Every other game gives you downtime. Shorter round based games like fighting games give you time to catch your breath. Respawn time is a reprieve for both sides. Even just being on the queue screen for Starcraft II was enough to get my heartrate up in anticipation for the stressful games.

Fighters are arguably bigger than they’ve ever been. SF6 alone has made massive inroads in terms of level of entry to the field.

Hell one need only look at the size of this years EVO.

Fighting games can simultaneously be bigger than they've ever been but nowhere near the level of success that other genres reach. You either have to be cool with losing 9/10 matches you play or have a large amount of knowledge and/or mechanical execution. Simplifying mechanical execution only goes so far because mechanical execution is just a foregone conclusion at a certain level of play, and most of the game becomes a mental exercise. Many people struggle to accept that they are the problem and the reason they're performing poorly, and this is something that's massively exacerbated by the prevalence of team-based multiplayer games. Prize pools at flagship events are always ridiculously low. One-on-one mentoring is by and away the easiest way to get into the genre, and it is also probably the most "expensive" way to introduce people bar none.

I love the genre; it's in a great place, and it doesn't need to change. I'm glad the playerbase is very cautious about losing some of the magic chasing after mass market appeal. The downside is just that it's hard to justify throwing a lot of money at these games.

Giant Grant Games makes a compelling case for why single-player campaign and mod-development experiences are often overlooked but are key for RTS crossover success. And this came out long before the success of BG3. I hold out hope that someone will crack the formula!

https://youtu.be/XehNK7UpZsc

UK regulators were objecting the deal because they were concerned that the takeover would reduce competition in cloud gaming.

Microsoft gave game streaming rights to Ubisoft, which made the Activision deal possible: https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/13/why-microsoft-had-to-relin...

"For Ubisoft, this deal means it has full and exclusive cloud-streaming rights to all current commercially available Activision games, as well as those released in the next 15 years." !!!

Ubisoft is the real winner here.

well, assuming there's actually a cloud gaming market. A fact that's still up for debate I think.

Right. Microsoft is just about the only player left in cloud gaming because Sony, Amazon and Google all tried and gave up in different ways, in part because none of them really found a market nor an audience. I heard Sony is trying again but leasing some cloud servers from Microsoft Azure's white box version of xCloud, ironically.

That last part is also why I think the Ubisoft deal is probably funny. Rumors are Ubi is also leasing much of their cloud gaming from Azure's white box version of xCloud, so Microsoft is likely still going to get paid for people playing Activision things through Ubi's so far unfinished cloud gaming app.

Nvidia still has GeForce NOW

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce-now/

Doesn't EA still have theirs?

Do they? I genuinely don't know and a quick search only adds confusion. I see a lot of news from when they went Beta in 2019 and then a lot of radio silence and I don't see any links to the service that don't have a "Technical Preview" or "Beta" next to them. That probably doesn't bode well as a signal for an active player base even if it is technically running.

Looks like they still do:

https://www.ea.com/ea-play

I think they rebranded Origin or whatever it was called, didn't even realize.

EA Play is not cloud gaming, it's a download subscription service.

I guess Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass is the same thing then.

it's both

Sony just relanced their streaming service this month with on paper better spec than Microsoft (4K streaming)

Latency is 90% of what matters in these products. Does higher resolution impact the latency?

Amazon has Luna

https://luna.amazon.com/

Apologies, I thought it had shut down already; I must have been confusing the shut down of game studios dedicated to it as the first step in a shutdown in the so-called "Stadia playbook" and thought they were further along it.

>> so far unfinished cloud gaming app.

As a gamer, few things would turn me away from a potential purchase more than the phrase "cloud gaming app". It sounds like DRM-infected bloatware ready to kick me from a server the moment my connection even hiccups. Only "cloud gaming app, now by Microsoft" could be worse.

xCloud (Microsoft's) and Geforce Now (nVidia's) both allegedly have large player bases.

The "neat" thing about xCloud is that you can try it for free under most Game Pass subscriptions. I think that is actually where "cloud gaming" currently excels, as a faster/better/glorified replacement for the old "Demo" games and modes. (Try a Game Pass game for a bit without downloading it, on a day where you expect few connection hiccups, to see if it is worth the hour or so wait while it downloads.) I think that is also part of why xCloud probably does have large MAU numbers.

I've tried to see if xCloud is also useful on my mobile devices for on-the-go gaming, but the connection issues have mostly tanked that for me. (I do know people using it to play games on the Steam Deck that the Steam Deck doesn't as well support; but they generally play at home on home connections even if they prefer the "mobile-like" form factor of the Deck.)

But yeah, the argument is that the audience for "cloud gaming" is incredibly limited (needs a strong internet connection, doesn't want to invest in up-to-date gaming hardware, or wants stranger form factors) and always will be, which is why it is fascinating that Microsoft got so much flak from the UK commissioners about controlling the current "cloud gaming" marketplace: Microsoft seems to be the most successful mostly just because it is an incredibly limited audience with few gamers interested. Most everyone else who has tried to enter the market, including Google, has failed to find players. (nVidia seems the next most successful and even they admit it is a niche side-project for them. They've been partly so successful by how much money they haven't spent and how cheap they've managed to run it so far, comparatively to the investments of their peers and bigger companies like Amazon and Google.)

that actually make a good reason to use cloud gaming honestly, trying game for 2-3 hours before downloading 100gb for it and not to make refund if you buy themselves is pretty neat

> needs a strong internet connection

I've used Xbox Cloud Gaming on a cheap $300 Walmart laptop all over my home on WiFi, several different cafe/bar WiFi networks, and several places tethered to my phone without any real playability concerns. I might not recommend it if you're playing some kind of twitch shooter kind of game, but I've played a lot of Forza, Starfield, Gotham Knights, and Ghost Recon Wildlands on it.

You must not be sensitive to lag or low latencies. Some players have no issue playing a 30fps games with dips into the 10s for example. Others do.

For me, it's just simply not up to the quality I can enjoy the game at.

I am pretty sensitive to it. It never dropped into low framerates. Sometimes I'd get a quick blast of compression noise but not often.

It's not 4K 120FPS, but on a 1080p laptop the quality was fine. Maybe unacceptable when playing on a 70" TV, but a 14" laptop or a 1920x1200 27" screen it's fine. Not as nice as natively rendered, but way nicer than what that $300 laptop could have done on its own!

It never dropped into the 30s, I consider framerates like that unplayable.

Compression artifacts, spotty connections etc. all of those can be issues with remote gaming. What is never an issue is framerate or graphical fidelity (minus video compression artifacts), which makes sense, considering you tend to have a nice machine remotely that plays your game (e.g. a 4080 on GeForce Now).

One thing I noticed was loading times on Starfield were even faster than on my desktop with an NVMe drive.

Cyberpunk at 1440p, 75Mbit/s and 120hz/fps feels pretty darn responsive, streaming in from GeForce Now. A local rig will beat it of course, can't cheat lights peed, but if you're close to a datacenter the added lag is negligible, especially if you can get the video stream at 120hz.

Even if it's 120 fps you can still have high latencies, because the time from button press to the next frame acting on that button press can be slow.

The game can stream at 120fps, but take extra like to register a jump for example.

Again, you might just not be sensitive to that.

There's also compression artifacts and bitrate that can make fine details already coarse and all that, even if it's 4k. That's what some won't find to be an issue and others will.

Oh definitely, everyone's experience will be different, not just due to their location in regards to the Nvidia datacenters, but also personal sensitivity to latency and such.

I'm surprised, I had pretty much the opposite experience. I used Xbox Cloud Gaming to play through Halo 5 (the only game in the series to not have a PC port) in four sessions over a few months, wrapping up last weekend.

I'm on a high spec desktop playing with an Xbox controller connected by USB. The desktop is on Ethernet, 200 Mbps down / 30 Mbps up.

In my experience, the game frequently failed to start. Most often I would watch the rocket ship loading screen for about a minute, then close it and retry. Probably about 1 in 10 times the game would start instantly, otherwise it would display the loading animation forever.

My understanding is that the game runs in 1080p on the original hardware (launch Xbox One) and runs in 4k on modern hardware (Series X). I'm not sure what the source resolution is for Cloud Streaming, but visually it looked like an old YouTube video. The game was designed with a large visual dynamic range. Video compression made it very hard to see in dark areas (think The Long Night episode of Game of Thrones). In colorful areas with more contrast I experienced lots of macroblocking.

Input lag made the game very frustrating to play. The Halo series is known for having generous aim assist, even so I found precision weapons useless and too hard to line up a shot. Occasional dropped button inputs got me killed too.

All-in-all I can't recommend Cloud Streaming to anyone. Looking at their catalog, maybe it would be more acceptable for games with limited motion like Phoenix Wright or Car Mechanic Simulator, but those run natively on cell phones or low-end hardware. Even then repeatedly failing to start a session is a turn off. Experiencing all of these problems every time I played makes me think it's not just a fluke.

> In my experience, the game frequently failed to start

I definitely got that a bunch right after Starfield launched, but it balanced out after several days. The period leading up before and after were and have been much better. Still happens sometimes though.

It's definitely not 4K, I'll grant you that. Playing Starfield locally installed on my desktop definitely gives a better framerate and higher quality, but ultimately I've put more hours in on cloud gaming simply because it's everywhere I have internet. I can play on my phone and an Xbox controller, anywhere.

I don't have much input lag, but I'm in a pretty well connected part of the country. On my phone right now ive got 20ms to microsoft.com, 19ms to google.com. At home on WiFi these values are in the low single digits. I dont know where Microsoft's servers are for the cloud gaming, that might be a part of it.

The technology they chose to power the experience, Rainway, seems to have needed a huge amount of work to get good enough for commercial adoption.

There have been large differences between app vs browser vs xbox streaming, too.

I wonder if this is a part of the quality difference. I've only used the app version, never the web.

On the same wired pc with the same internet, playing through the app has consistently been a better experience than through a browser.

It's been about a year since I last used it. Back then Halo worked better through a browser and the app was very flaky. I wound up getting an xbox console and the experience with streaming on the console has been pretty good. All over wifi AC1600.

It all depends on what you're looking for in your gaming. I rarely replay old games. I'm often on the go, and don't really want to spend the money on a high end gaming rig nor a console at home. So from my non-gaming laptop I can hop on Xbox Cloud Gaming and play recent games in high quality pretty much anywhere. I've been able to play on cafe wifi, tethered to my phone, on wifi around the house, loads of places. And after finding the subscription on a sale its cheaper than buying even two new games a year.

If you're the kind of gamer who does love having a collection of old games you go back to, then yeah its pretty terrible.

Definitely depends on how you approach gaming. To me, gaming is something you have dedicated gear for, set aside dedicated time for, sit down somewhere comfortable, remove all distractions, turn down the lights, and so on, like watching a movie. The idea of playing a game "on the go" is as ridiculous to me as watching a movie "on the go" (or, really doing anything on the go--when I'm going somewhere, that's what I'm doing, I'm not doing something else).

To others, I guess picking up a casual game in a cafe might be interesting... Maybe they're a great target market for Cloud Gaming, I dunno. I sure am not!

Honestly, there's a bunch of games where cloud gaming could really help the cheating problem. The issue with it is that if you're a ways away from the cloud servers it puts you at more of a disadvantage.

Then again, for a lot of these games you currently get some level of advantage for throwing a lot of money at your system so you can run with better settings at a faster framerate, so maybe it's not so much less fair as differently fair.

Having your competitive game reduced to pure input output doesn't solve cheating (especially in an age of image recognition and trained AI/ML), but it does even the playing field a lot.

On the contrary, I'm quite happy about "cloud gaming app" because all the DRM-infected software stays remote. I get a web browser or whatever, and they pipe video to me and pipe input back up. Really lightweight on my side, less room for insane anti-cheat whatevers. Now, the connection issues, the online-only requirements, the resolution, the lag, etc, these things are less good. But I really like the software part.

Laying in bed while playing my game on the cloud is real neat. Call it whatever you’d like, I love it!

HN is the only place on the net where I've ever seen people defending the premise of cloud gaming and it's usually (not always) people saying something like "Well I don't game much myself but cloud gaming sounds compelling..."

I think this is why tech companies keep trying to implement cloud gaming and it keeps flopping with consumers. Tech industry people who aren't much of gamers themselves think there is some large untapped market of people who aren't gamers right now but could become gamers if the barrier to entry were lowered. In theory that logic makes sense but in practice that market just doesn't materialize. The barrier to entry for gaming is already quite low, it's a very cheap hobby and almost everybody who really wants to play games has already found a way to do so without cloud gaming.

I do game a good bit, and I like cloud gaming. I find myself away from my gaming desktop often, which makes cloud gaming pretty enticing. And overall it's currently incredibly cheap, a good value.

Same, and I enjoy having maxed out graphics on a large screen while my MacBook stays at ambient temperature, instead of having a noisy space heater howling under my desk.

I get this use case, but I don't think it's very common. Most gamers are near their gaming hardware most of the time. Gamers who travel often usually have some mobile gaming hardware already. The number of people who would game but can't because they travel often and aren't satisfied with existing mobile gaming hardware is minimal. Not zero, but not a huge untapped market either.

Personally, I game almost exclusively on a laptop (even at home.) Suppose I was unsatisfied with gaming on a laptop because only the most powerful gaming PC with graphics turned all the way up will satisfy me... would cloud gaming really be an enticing answer to somebody with such high standards? Sure the 'cloud' server could max out the graphics settings, but latency and compression would probably ruin the experience for somebody with such high standards. Now maybe my issue with laptop gaming isn't the fidelity but instead the hassle of traveling with a laptop. The convenience margin between traveling with a laptop vs an ipad isn't zero, but it's pretty small. I think this is the niche cloud gaming fits into. So cloud gaming is for people who travel often and light, who don't care about fidelity/latency but do care about saving ~1kg of weight in their carry-on bag.

It's not even that I'm traveling often (as in hotel stay or something equivalent), it's that I'm often out of the house for a bit. Gaps of time where it doesn't make sense to go all the way home to play a game, but enough time to get like a half hour or more of gaming in.

Kids want to go bounce around at the trampoline park? Cool, I'll hop on the wifi there and game. Had to go into the office and am taking a lunch break? Cool, I can hop on the game for an hour. Meeting up with people later but have an hour downtime? Cool, I can go to any cafe or bar and play for a bit instead of heading all the way home.

Just today I was far on the other side of town (over an hour away) as my wife was meeting up with her sister to do some stuff after some big family things. Cool, bring my cheap laptop with me or just use my phone with a controller, I can game for a couple of hours while she does her thing. But then now tonight that exact same game saves are synced to play on my desktop at the house, or on my cheap laptop while on the patio, or wherever. Maybe I'll even spend an hour in the hot tub tonight with the cheap laptop on a towel nearby. Good luck getting that flexible of an experience with a full console or desktop.

And then this even continues to something like the Steam Deck or the other streaming focused handhelds, which I'm now pretty interested in. It doesn't need to have high end gear on it if it's got a decent network connection. And as I've mentioned here, at least where I'm at I'm almost always with some kind of low latency network. It's so ubiquitous around me these days.

> Good luck getting that flexible of an experience with a full console or desktop.

You could stream your gameplay without resorting to Cloud. Steam has (had?) a great service where you could stream your game from one computer to another on the same network.

Admittedly, I'm not in the cloud gaming market nor would I ever be. First, data caps prevent me from doing this. Second, let's say I wanted to stream from some public place. I have to connect to their wifi? Non-starter. Not going to happen. Stream over mobile? Data caps again, this time they charge an arm and a leg and the connection quality is garbage. Third, if I am out of my house I'm probably driving. A Switch, Steam Deck, or Cloud Gaming can't do anything for that.

It turns out I'm no longer a child. I cannot game while out of the house anymore and that's ok. I will never sign up for a cloud gaming service until they can get over the infrastructural issues that prevent adults like me from engaging. For starters that would be public transit, and better Internet infrastructure and services.

I'm happy you found a use case for it. Most of the United States in particular, and I'd wager the world as a whole, does not and will not be in a place where that's viable.

> It turns out I'm no longer a child. I cannot game while out of the house anymore and that's ok.

I'm not a child, haven't been one for a long time. I still find time to play games out of the house. You don't need to be a child to play videogames outside of the house.

Just this weekend we went to the park. I drew the straw to watch my infant nap in the stroller while my wife ran off with my older child. An hour of downtime. Turn on the 5G hotspot, whip out the laptop, and I'm on Starfield on my cheap laptop with several hours of battery life.

You're not a child but a child is what enables that behavior. I do not have a child nor am I a child. If I am out of the house I am driving, engaged in an activity, or there socially. When I was a kid I had my gameboy and I'd play it nonstop. Then I started driving and having adult responsibilities and all of a sudden I'm not able to do that.

Then again, I wouldn't have gone to the park to watch my infant while I played games. I could do that at my house.

I forgot to address the Steam Home Streaming with my earlier comment, and I did want to bring that up as well. I didn't even think about it, as the smoothness of cloud gaming just completely pushed this capability out of my mind.

Steam Home Streaming works pretty well on a LAN. Quality-wise, with my desktop at home its even higher quality than Xbox Cloud Gaming. I've got many hundreds of hours on my Steam Link. I just wished they'd make it work well outside of the LAN. I've had mixed experiences trying to run it on a few different VPN stacks. I ran into challenges of it not seeing the other computers, the stream being very unstable and crashing, and other issues. Plus, it means I need my computer's local console unlocked at home, but I prefer my computers to get locked automatically. And even then I've had games get in some stuck state launching or closing where I had to manually intervene on the local console to fix it.

Meanwhile, with cloud gaming I just click launch and the game is going. There's no waiting for updates. There's no managing a local console. I don't even need a gaming rig.

Also, you mention "Most of the United States in particular", I am in the United States. This has been my experience in one of the larger metro areas in the US (DFW). I don't get why it would be viable here but nowhere else in the US. 43% of US households have fiber-optic home internet. 60% of households live in areas with 5G coverage. I haven't been on many trips since getting it, but even a few years ago I could manage to sometimes make Steam Home Streaming work from a hotel WiFi on VPN at various places around the country, even with its challenges I mentioned above. I've got family who game a good bit with PlayStation cloud gaming service on a 5G home internet connection.

43% fiber and 60% 5G definitely isn't 100%, I agree. But it does mean there's a pretty big chunk of consumers who can use this, today. I'm not in some magical internet wonderland inhabited by just my family and me. 43% of ~330 million people is >140M people with home fiber internet, nearly 200M people with 5G coverage, today. And that's just ignoring all the consumers with actually decent cable internet connectivity.

> 43% of US households have fiber-optic home internet. 60% of households live in areas with 5G coverage.

I'm doubting both of these numbers. Even if 5G coverage is there, like in my home, it's not a good enough connection to do anything beyond watch the 5G symbol play tag with the LTE symbol.

Even when we live in that world we still live under data caps.

> I'm not in some magical internet wonderland inhabited by just my family and me

You are to an extent.

The 43% number came from a study done last year, I imagine its even higher today:

https://fiberbroadband.org/2022/01/05/fiber-broadband-enters...

And once again that's only FTTH. Loads of coax networks have enough throughput and low enough latency to make it work. Either way, I'm still just pointing out its out there. Fast enough internet is in a lot of places, as mentioned even the WiFi at a few coffee shops and bars around me have had fast enough speeds for a decent quality experience. Which makes sense, as the cable provider in the area offers 300Mbit as a minimum speed for only $65/mo on their business plans with WiFi6 APs. The fiber provider offers like 500Mbit symmetrical for the same on their business tier. Every little shop has at least a few hundred megabits of internet if they need to get their POS terminals online.

Mint Mobile offers "unlimited" (aka throttled after 40GB) for $30/mo without any promotional pricing. Visible offers unlimited for $25 for their basic plan and $35 for their plus plan which includes ultra-wideband and a "premium network experience" whatever that means. From my experiences Xbox Cloud Gaming uses ~1GB/hr. And yeah, within my home or my office building my cellular connectivity is pretty poor. But at the same time both places also have WiFi6/6E APs and gigabit+ fiber connections.

And I'm gonna go ahead and reply to the other comment here so we can re-unify this chain. Apologies for breaking it earlier.

> a child is what enables that behavior

Yeah, in that specific circumstance a child is what enabled that specific instance. And I had the infant at the park because we were all going to the park and had other things to do walking around after that, it didn't make sense for me to just stay at home the whole time. However, you're just ignoring the other instances I've shared. Here's another recent one. A family member was out of town for a while and wanted me to check in and socialize with their cat who gets anxiety without friendly humans around every now and then. So I went over, cleaned up after the cat, hopped on the couch with the cat in my lap, and played games for an hour on their WiFi. No kids involved in that story.

Mobile gaming is a growing market. Its a nearly $60B industry these days. People seem to really enjoy the Nintendo Switch and Steam Deck, phones with larger screens continue to get more and more popular. Cloud Gaming can enable these lower power devices to run much more computationally demanding games with similar experiences to game console or gaming PC performance while only consuming a few watts of power. A lot of people are finding time to play games on handheld devices, the real question IMO is if the economics of cloud gaming really work, because for a large chunk of the country all the technology is already there.

I sold my laptop that was capable of gaming and now I only use geforce now from my macbook. The fidelity is better. The latency isn't noticeable to me in single player games. And then price wise, for the amount I sold my old laptop I'd get 7 years of cloud gaming at current prices, maybe more as gaming is something I dip in and out of, although my kids are also using it at the moment so I can't dip out.

I've never used it while travelling. So I'm definitely a different demographic to the one you're describing.

And here I thought GeeForce Now was the de-facto leader in the cloud gaming market.

I use it regularly for single player games and it's quite nice! AFAIK they have the biggest supported library yet that is still my biggest issue with it: it doesn't support some of the games I'd like to play on it!

Coincidentally, I am building a peer-to-peer one: https://borg.games

Sony's PS+ is really good, I was really impressed at how smooth the whole experience was. The ability to play titles all the way back to PS2 in an officially supported manner is really nice!

I think the fact Steam / Valve has not jumped into that bandwagon speaks for itself. Its fine when Microsoft does like Xbox Game Pass because they have nothing to lose with it, and they gain people who may want to own some of those games, or who want it for the Microsoft games on the subscription.

A big part of Xbox Cloud Gaming, and also about ChatGPT, is MSFT built this huge cloud product and needs customers occupying its capacity to justify the capital expenditure.

I'd thought Steam not offering a subscription service points more to Valve being ossified, or Valve having enough insight to know it is a terrible business move and will lose money in the long term. It would not be much effort at all to allow publishers to opt-in their titles, and they already have all the playtime metrics to share out revenue and DRM to control access. The biggest headache would be picking a price point and the revenue sharing algorithm, much like Amazon with its ebook library subscription.

I think the technology is about 80% there. To my eye, the graphics and performance are the same as running the game locally.

Provided you have a good internet connection, if you could just run a AAA game off of your crummy computer or tv, why would you buy an expensive graphics card? It is definitely where things are going.

It depends on the game.

Latency concerns, connection reliability, and bandwidth are all potential factors.

You can't just have a "good" internet connection. For some games the difference between 30ms and 100ms latency is a great experience vs being almost unplayable. This is not exaggeration, this is fact and millions of gamers who actually measure their ping will tell you the same.

The latency between peripheral input and visual feedback is much more important than the latency between a game client and server. The servers have all sorts of mitigation strategies to compensate. For inputs, it’s all on the human. Which feels bad.

The latency between a peripheral input and the visual feedback includes that latency between the client and server in a streaming scenario. The TV isn't smart enough to implement rollback netcode for every game.

> The servers have all sorts of mitigation strategies to compensate.

I haven't seen any papers where cloud gaming servers implement rollback logic on your inputs in behalf of the game developer.

Even assuming games that do support native rollback, most rollback netcode implicitly considers you're local to your game client, not in some relay box 7 frames or more in the past.

I was talking about clients and servers in the classic setup, not for cloud gaming. My parent was talking about game ping and I was pointing out that cloud services are even more sensitive since you’re not interacting with the game client locally.

Rocket League is an extremely twitchy game, especially in 1s. Several of the best 1s players in the world were playing from KSA for years on well over 100 ping. They were winning tournaments without a single loss against players on single-digit ping.

I think there's still a market for what you're describing, but in terms of players and revenue it seems like competitive multiplayer titles that don't require particularly beefy hardware and where network latency is especially important have become what's most popular and profitable.

For example looking at September's games by MAUs[1], #6, #10 and #17 seem like good fits for cloud gaming, but the rest seem like a bad fit for cloud with fairly benign recommended hardware and latency sensitivity. Developers seem to be aware and willing to target fairly modest hardware specs for these titles as well. For example the new CoD's recommended GPU requirements is a 1070 and previous game was a 1060, which matches up with Steam hardware surveys.[2]

[1]https://newzoo.com/resources/rankings/top-20-pc-games

[2] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/steam-survey-results-june-...

yes, esports titles will run on a potato pc

there's no need to rent a PC 50ms-100ms away for esports when a bottom of the range PC will happily run it at 144fps

These Xbox cloud instances seem like 5-15 ms away while on my home wifi, and like 30-40ms when on my phone.

wifi/celluar have insane jitter than make them completely unusable for competitive gaming

if I ping my router on wifi it ranges from 2-10ms

40-100ms on celluar

(whereas ethernet is consistently about 100us)

A 5 minute average ping to microsoft.com on my phone while walking around just now was 19ms. Max of 29ms. Pixel 6a on Mint, a $15/mo plan

I have gigabit fiber and somehow Xbox Cloud Gaming looks like shit. I don’t know how anyone uses it! (On Ethernet, in LA)

I have 1 gbps as well and it has worked fine for me. Especially if I'm sitting close to the my AP or even better when connected via ethernet. In some cases, I couldn't tell the difference between locally installed game or cloud. Games like Lego Star wars Skywalker saga or Ghost Recon Wildlands work really well. Although I haven't tried any fast paced online FPS games yet.

I've been playing Starfield and it's been fine for me. Occasionally the quality degrades and you can see this very obvious vertical wipe as it syncs back up, but it happens rarely enough for me that I don't mind it.

Exactly right. For what it's worth, Nvidia's GeForce Now is (and has been) substantially better. Interestingly, since this deal, you can now play a number of GamePass games on GeForce Now. There was a several minute long wait time to play Starfield on GamePass but it was available on GFN via my GamePass subscription - with no wait time. Same goes with a number of UbiSoft titles.

I had the best experience, quality wise, with Stadia though.

I have 100mbs internet and it works near perfectly for me. For me graphics are better on xbox cloud gaming because my xbox one s can't run games with the highest graphics settings. Maybe I'm geographically close to one of the xbox cloud data centers while you're far away?

You're probably less sensitive to the compression.

I don’t know - I started gaming again during the pandemic after trying Stadia on a whim. It worked great over 100 megabit DSL. Amazingly so. I went in super skeptical but was blown away. Perhaps being in the Bay Area helped?

I consider myself pretty attuned to (and annoyed by) compression artifacts in streaming video.

I did end up buying an Xbox instead of using Stadia though - I couldn’t get over paying full price for games I didn’t actually own.

Stadia worked a lot better than xCloud though.

Maybe your ISP is slowing down the packets.

Here's one usecase where I see cloud gaming adding value: esports.

With cloud gaming it's possible to playing field far more, because competitions can now force the same latency by introducing artificial latency.

Cloud gaming also eliminates cheats like wall hacks (or fog of war removal), which is currently possible because the game client and rendering engine all run on a local machine.

I can't see how that will ever fly with actual gamers.

Playing a game with latency is horrible, be it artificial or not. If you want the pinnacle of any esport, it will be played on LANs and never streamed.

It's a subpar experience that almost exclusively casual gamers deem acceptable.

This same argument could be made for forcing all professional athletes to compete while severely drunk. It would be hilarious though.

It would fly for mid-tier e-sports. A lot of those matches are played remotely and the difference between a Chinese player playing an Argentinian player and a Chilean player playing an Argentinian player can be quite noticeable. Being able to level that playing field would be excellent.

Most e-sports events don't fly players into an arena - that's only for really high budget events.

Reasonable but irrelevant arguments. Esport games are essentially defined by their demand for low network latency which is precisely the main difficulty with cloud gaming.

I disagree with this as a given: > Esport games are essentially defined by their demand for low network latency

It’s only a given because circumstances force and/or allow this.

Also, how do leagues and competitions account for a 30 ms vs 70 ms latency difference?

I ask this as someone middle-aged who immediately notices this difference, when playing ladder PvP games.

I'd have gone absolutely nuts in my comp. gaming days with forced-latency.

As a gamer, I view the cloud gaming market to be an odd thing to argue over because I don’t care about it all.

It’s the opposite of what I want!

15 years is a long time though. I suspect we're not far away from being able to sell a 100$ device, that can AI reconstruct and upscale a super compressed video feed, so that you can stream with lower latencies or even with worse connections.

Nvidia seems to be leading the way here.

But imagine in the cloud, they only needed to render games at 320p, and then they'd stream it compressed at low bitrate using H266 (assuming it's out in a few years). Then your "console", only needs to AI regenerate and upscale the feed, and it ends up looking photo-real or close to it.

You could even explore methods of compression on the video that the AI is best as reconstructing from.

I want some of what you're having.

That makes absolutely no sense. There is no possibility for a AI algorithm to be more efficient than a simple compression and decompression.

I think op was talking about AI powered lossy ups along, but I imagine AI would be able to generate better compression algos for highly targeted use cases too.

I'm talking about better versions of this for example: https://www.infoq.com/news/2020/10/nvidia-video-bandwidth/

Does this mean World of Warcraft will eventually be playable on Ubisoft's competitor to Nvidia's GeforceNow?

Does Ubisoft even have a competitor to Geforce Now?

But presumably they could sell their rights or license them to others, so who knows how this will actually play out.

Yeah, I think the key downside for Microsoft is they can't just make them exclusive to Xbox cloud gaming and they have to treat the Activision titles as if they were buying them from a 3rd party studio.

Yes, Ubisoft’s competitor is xCloud. That’s what the deal that the CMA forced Microsoft to make does.

I don't think "cloud gaming" would include it just because it's a multiplayer game with shared servers; my understanding of cloud gaming is that it refers to games being installed only on the server side with the "UI" being streamed to the player rather than the game itself running locally. I could see some potential ambiguity around what constitutes a full local game versus a client streaming a cloud game, but the World of Warcraft installer requires downloading around 100 GB of data files, which seems pretty clearly not a "cloud" game.

That said, I think I remember hearing that Overwatch (or maybe Overwatch 2, I honestly haven't played either and don't have strong enough associations to differentiate between them in what I've read) either is already or is going to be made available to play via Steam, which would be a pretty stark departure from Blizzard's usual insistence on using the Battle.net client for their games, and I wouldn't be surprised if in the long run things get more streamlined between former Blizzard properties and other Microsoft owned games. When the initial deal was announced (back before all of the process around approvals started), I remember a lot of people half-joking that it wouldn't take long for Microsoft to just make WoW subscriptions part of Gamepass, which still doesn't seem _that_ far fetched to me, and I certainly wouldn't be at all surprised if some Blizzard games end up being available through the Microsoft store on Windows. If this does happen, I hope that they don't complete deprecate the "old" ways of launching the games mostly because Blizzard games often work extraordinarily well via Wine, and at least as far as I'm aware, there isn't any super reliable way to install and run games from the Microsoft store on Linux.

Overwatch 2 is on Steam, yeah. That read like a pretty desperate move by Blizzard so keep the game relevant after they announced they were dropping PVE.

They also forced resale of those games as part of it - so Ubisoft is allowed to sell Activision games. Originally MS proposed only playing games you’d already bought on Ubisoft’s platform

We likely won't see any real effects of this until the next generation of consoles, but I think in 3-4 years it is going to be very interesting to see what happens with gaming.

Putting Nintendo aside since they really don't compete, they are kinda just in their own "Nintendo" space and that isn't a bad thing.

But Sony having some real competition is a good thing. Sony has a bad tendency of anti-consumer tendencies in their gaming space when they are the leader and they get cocky. They did it with the PS3 and they are repeating some of that with the PS5 generation.

Not that Microsoft hasn't engaged in some of their own practices, but at the moment we have a basically unchecked Playstation and that is bad for the gaming industry. We need real competition in the gaming space.

We can argue all day that Microsoft could have built their own studios, but IP is also very important. So are established developers with a certain style of game associated with them.

Will this actually be good for the gaming industry? I don't know. But I know that the current situation isn't good either.

> But Sony having some real competition is a good thing. Sony has a bad tendency of anti-consumer tendencies in their gaming space when they are the leader and they get cocky. They did it with the PS3 and they are repeating some of that with the PS5 generation.

I'm curious about which "anti-consumer practices" Sony is responsible for, that Microsoft isn't.

So far it seems to me that Sony did acquire some gaming studios, but mostly smaller ones. Microsoft has recently bought two big studios with massive franchises, of which some are already not available for Sony platforms.

PS2Linux, the way PS3 Linux was a downgrade to PS2Linux, and later removed via firmware update, for example.

That's hardly on their "gaming space", like OP said.

I disagree, in any case, publishing deals offering money to studios for them not to publish on XBox like came up on the trials.

> I disagree

Have you played many games on PSLinux?

> in any case, publishing deals offering money to studios for them not to publish on XBox like came up on the trials.

If you suggest that buying exclusives is a bad thing, then you should agree that buying large independent studios is, too.

As owner of a PS2 Linux, I have, from those indie folks you might have heard of, shared via the PS2Linux SCEE forums.

PS2Linux was the successor of Yaroze.

Exclusives are great for studios.

The bad practice is placing bad behaviours on the contract fine print like not allowing for feature parity after the exclusivity deal runs out, or suffering the risk of a lawsuit.

> The bad practice is placing bad behaviours on the contract fine print like not allowing for feature parity after the exclusivity deal runs out, or suffering the risk of a lawsuit.

Are you suggesting that e.g. Square-Enix executives didn't know what they were signing?

They signed away exclusives in exchange for money. How is that worse than acquiring big studios with large IP portfolios and lock them to your own platforms?

It is a nice business you have here, it would be a shame if something happened to it...

You make it sound like the poor gaming studios didn't read the contract documents and got trapped in a draconian nightmare.

That's a naive take if I have ever seen one.

Indeed, likewise no one should say the same about OEMs doing deals with Microsoft about pre-installed Windows, or researchers with NVidia.

Those mean companies.

You are comparing a 70%-30% market share split in consoles, to a virtually 100% for Microsoft in OEM PC sales, and a >85% for Nvidia in AI and research oriented GPUs [0]

Microsoft also controls ~95% of the PC gaming market, which makes up ~40% of the total video game market [1].

So remind me again, which studios were bullied by Sony to give up access to the majority of the market, in exchange for nothing?

[0] https://www.reuters.com/technology/amd-likely-offer-details-...

[1] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/report-pc-and-console-global-g....

Moving goalposts.

First they are to blame, then they are poor fellows without an option.

They are just not comparable.

Microsoft has the means and the marketshare to compete, and they do, they just failed to take the lead so far. There is no scenario where Sony could pressure developers to release exclusive games and content, and give nothing in return.

On the other hand, Microsoft has all the leverage in the world to pressure OEMs to distribute their software, and block competition. Historically, their marketshare has always been over 90%. Nvidia dominates in the professional market.

These are all publicly available numbers.

So far, you have failed to even provide clear and verifiable examples of developers "bullied" by Sony to not release content for XBox. You may want to take a look at Microsoft behaviour though, since they have a history of trying to get indie developers to prioritize their platforms or else [0]

[0] https://www.techdigest.tv/2014/02/are_microsoft_b.html

They made it pretty impossible to use so it's not fair to say it wasn't in a consumer space.

still pissed me off when i had the option of losing online gaming or losing console access to my ps3.

What were you going to do on that thing anyway? Run a Mandelbrot set? The thing has like no ram! Its just an embedded device to run games.

Justifying the removal because of its limitations isn’t fair. It was an advertised feature of the system. If I bought a PS3 to use as a Linux desktop, online multiplayer game machine, and SACD player based on their advertisement and then found I had to get rid of the first two to keep online gaming, on a $600 console, I’d be pretty upset.

At that time (before GPGPU become big for such purposes) scientists used PS3s to build cheap (much cheaper than IBM's server offerings containing a Cell processors) computing cluster for HPC. These PS3 computation clusters are were hard to program, but if you managed it, they were really fast (for their time).

Yeah I hear ya. Think the air force also used it.

Lets put aside the fact that Sony was probably unhappy that their loss leader console was being used in this manner(they did release the feature so maybe they could justify the PR bonus of supporting our troops or something).

All these researchers probably had no need to upgrade their firmware once they got set up since (correct me if im wrong) no firmware update actually improved the OtherOS functionality in any way so they lost nothing when a new firmware took it away. Only people really complaining about it were using it as a games (or piracy) machine and a Linux box to do...something?

> no firmware update actually improved the OtherOS functionality in any way so they lost nothing when a new firmware took it away.

At that time the respective scientists were quite concerned not to accidentally install this firmware update, and whether Sony would invent more draconian measures to disable consoles with old firmware.

This lead to a huge distrust in Sony, and accelerated the switch from the Cell to the emerging GPGPU technology for respective scientific calculation. Thus, this was some PR disaster for Sony.

Those scientists don't have good processes then. There are typically stringent procedures in regards to updating and handling software on laboratory computing equipment.

>This lead to a huge distrust in Sony, and accelerated the switch from the Cell to the emerging GPGPU technology for respective scientific calculation. Thus, this was some PR disaster for Sony.

Any proof of this? As far as I could tell, Cell was a dead end as a lot of the top tier benefits never really materialized irrespective of Sony shenanigans. Serious scientists used the server offerings from IBM. IBM eventually stopped supporting their server offerings for the most part. Why would they do this other than people stopped finding the architecture good for their needs?

Been a decade+ now, but I recall using it as an irssi client and ssh devbox fairly often before i lost lost ability to.

A few things, and I am likely forgetting others:

Backwards compatibility: It was a mess on the PS3 with different launch models having different levels of compatibility. They later removed this functionality completely on the PS3. The PS4 had no backwards compatibility for PS3 instead you had to purchase (or subscribe) to play games in the cloud, games you may already own.

Compared to Xbox which the Xbox One did not launch with backwards compatibility once the leadership was changed they started a project to bring backwards compatibility to Xbox 360 and OG Xbox games (admittedly on a limited basis but you could stick in your original disks and it worked, no extra charge). This carried over to the Series consoles.

Related to this Sony has re-released their games many times and been able to thanks to the lack of proper backwards compatibility.

The price of the PS3.

The cell processor of the PS3, Sony thinking that devs would bend over backwards to support their architecture.

Paying developers either for exclusive content or for exclusive third party games. The content is the one that really drives me insane because if you buy a game on another platform you are getting less content for the same money.

Blocking cross play with other consoles for a long time and then only allowing it in certain situations (I don't actually know if this has improved yet or not).

There are likely a few others that I can't remember right now but I am about to hop into a meeting. But has Microsoft done some of these things? yes, but before Phil Spensor came in and changed Xbox.

Most of these grievances are more about changes in the architectural direction than anything else.

I don't see how using the Cell processor could be considered "anti-consumer". After all, we are talking about a time when consoles didn't generally use "off the self" processors - Nintendo had a customized PowerPC, too. Using more generic architectures is a quite recent development.

> Paying developers either for exclusive content or for exclusive third party games.

Both Microsoft and Nintendo do this, in different ways. Let's not forget that some of Microsoft exclusives came from Rare and Bungie, studios with a relatively long independent history.

> There are likely a few others that I can't remember right now but I am about to hop into a meeting. But has Microsoft done some of these things? yes, but before Phil Spensor came in and changed Xbox.

Spencer was the GM all the way back to 2014, so I don't think that's true.

On the other hand, I honestly cannot believe that we are discussing if Microsoft is more anti-consumer, or more monopolistic, than Sony.

Maybe the cell processor was not anti-consumer but I also mentioned Sony being cocky which it very much was.

As far as Bungie, they were bought by Microsoft by the time Halo was made exclusive. I am not remembering any exclusive games from Rare before being bought by Microsoft?

You are right that Phil Spensor was the GM in 2014. That is a year after the Xbox One release ate, after many of the past mistakes were made. I don't know of examples of Microsoft engaging in many of these behaviors and in fact doing the opposite since he came in (existing contracts that was made before him being an exception). If I am wrong I would love examples, but I am not aware of them.

I am not necessarily saying that Microsoft is more or less anti consumer as a whole. But their gaming devision has done things (often in direct counter to what Sony is doing) that are more consumer friendly behaviors.

At the end of the day. It is Sony vs Microsoft here. The chance of us getting another serious contender in the gaming space is basically zero due to the cost, risk, and long term planning required.

> Maybe the cell processor was not anti-consumer but I also mentioned Sony being cocky which it very much was.

What does cocky even mean? These are corporations!

> I am not remembering any exclusive games from Rare before being bought by Microsoft?

You need to go back to the Super Nintendo and Nintendo 64 era, then.

Golden Eye, Donkey Kong Country, Killer Instinct, Banjo-Kazooie, among others.

> I am not necessarily saying that Microsoft is more or less anti consumer as a whole. But their gaming devision has done things (often in direct counter to what Sony is doing) that are more consumer friendly behaviors.

Right, but where are those examples?

I'm of the opinion that Sony Entertainment paying for exclusivity deals with Square-Enix, is not remotely comparable to Microsoft buying a massive studio (Bethesda Softworks), with incredibly popular franchises (Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Doom), and locking them to their platforms barely three years after.

I'm also old enough to remember how Microsoft essentially killed any chances of open standards in videogames with their DirectX API, a move with massive consequences to other platforms, so much so that even nowadays, your best chance to run games on Linux is to use a DirectX translator.

> Right, but where are those examples?

I gave other examples in my post that you have not responded too.

> What does cocky even mean? These are corporations!

Not sure that changes anything. Cocky in this sense is Sony thinking they can get away with something because they were running high after the PS2 era.

> You need to go back to the Super Nintendo and Nintendo 64 era, then. Golden Eye, Donkey Kong Country, Killer Instinct, Banjo-Kazooie, among others.

Ok? What exactly does that have to do with Microsoft? They bought rare in 2002. I am completely missing the point you are trying to make.

> I'm of the opinion that Sony Entertainment paying for exclusivity deals with Square-Enix, is not remotely comparable to Microsoft buying a massive studio (Bethesda Softworks), with incredibly popular franchises (Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Doom), and locking them to their platforms barely three years after.

I strongly disagree. However as I mentioned my key problem is paying for exclusive content. It is indefensible that I pay the same amount for a game on Xbox with LESS content than on PS5 because Sony paid money to try to boost the sales of their consoles.

Yes Microsoft has made mistakes, but Sony has made their own mistakes and every time they do its because they are cocky going into a new generation with a significant market advantage.

That is why I feel like Sony needs strong competition and we need these consoles to be much much closer in marketshare for both companies to actually have to fight for consumer dollars instead of Sony just getting away with whatever they want because they have the big splashy exclusive games.

> I gave other examples in my post that you have not responded too.

Where?

The only one is cross-play, and let's be honest here, how would Microsoft justify not supporting cross-play, when their consoles are essentially PCs running a modified version of Windows?

> Cocky in this sense is Sony thinking they can get away with something because they were running high after the PS2 era.

I'm not sure what to think about this comment. Corporations aren't cocky. Sony isn't even a monopoly.

> Ok? What exactly does that have to do with Microsoft? They bought rare in 2002. I am completely missing the point you are trying to make.

They bought Rare and their exclusive IP, which became Microsoft exclusives. Same with Bungie, Bethesda, and now, more than likely, Activision-Blizzard.

In fact, that seems to be Microsoft modus operandi: buy big studios, lock popular franchises on their platforms. It is not disputable that Microsoft bought their way in gaming, as all the acquired studios had previous, very profitable, franchises they capitalized on.

> However as I mentioned my key problem is paying for exclusive content. It is indefensible that I pay the same amount for a game on Xbox with LESS content than on PS5 because Sony paid money to try to boost the sales of their consoles.

Right. I still don't understand how you couldn't agree on the fact that Microsoft is doing precisely that, but with whole franchises.

PlayStation owners won't be able to play, say, the new Elder Scrolls. It is likely that they won't be able to play CoD in three or four years. How would you feel if Sony Entertainment were to buy EA, making a bunch of sport franchises PlayStation exclusives?

You seem to be OK with that. That is a bit hypocritical, isn't it.

> That is why I feel like Sony needs strong competition and we need these consoles to be much much closer in marketshare for both companies to actually have to fight for consumer dollars instead of Sony just getting away with whatever they want because they have the big splashy exclusive games.

So the answer to market dominance is... market consolidation?

And the answer to in house exclusives is... taking cross-platform games and making them Microsoft exclusives?

That is utter nonsense.

> Maybe the cell processor was not anti-consumer but I also mentioned Sony being cocky which it very much was.

What you call "cocky" I call confident and maybe overambitious.

The Cell was a radical departure from processors of its day. Sony tried to bring heterogeneous computing to consumers on its dime. Unfortunately it didn't work out.

From a R&D point of view, old Sony was way more interesting. Today's Sony, the "non-cocky" Sony according to you, just slap the latest AMD APU into a box and call it a day.

> I am not remembering any exclusive games from Rare before being bought by Microsoft?

Although not universally, most Rare games were exclusive to Nintendo consoles from 1986-2002.

> You are right that Phil Spensor was the GM in 2014. That is a year after the Xbox One release ate, after many of the past mistakes were made. I don't know of examples of Microsoft engaging in many of these behaviors and in fact doing the opposite since he came in (existing contracts that was made before him being an exception). If I am wrong I would love examples, but I am not aware of them.

Most of your Sony examples are from the PS3 generation which predates the Microsoft Xbox One debacle. So we may as well bring up the Games for Windows Live and years of trying to push PC gamers to Xbox instead of investing in PC for Microsoft.

Backwards compatibility was a luxury, and not the standard, until recently. The first Nintendo backwards compatible home console was the Wii in 2005. Rapidly changing architecture differences made playing older games difficult. The GBA, DS, PS2, and PS3 all had custom hardware needed to play older games. The fact that the PS3 could play PS1 games in any way should be lauded, not labeled as anti-consumer.

Backwards compatibility has been standard on PC since pretty much the start. This is absolute bare minimum stuff.

Tautologically impossible for something to be an absolute bare minimum if it wasn't common in the industry for decades.

I’m not sure what you mean by backwards compatibility of launch PS3s. At launch the PS3 had PS2 hardware backwards compatibility in both models (20GB and 60GB). The launch PS3 is the ultimate backwards compatibility console (imho). Later revisions removed that hardware but provided software emulation for PS2 (except it seems like they removed that at some later date). A launch PS3 and PS5, both unmodded, will allow you to effectively play every PS console game (not portable) made since 1995.

I have several Xbox games that have to be played on original hardware and are not supported by backwards compatibility, and Nintendo only ever supported previous systems when they did offer backwards compatibility.

You missed Sony removing Other OS, SACD playback, and other on the box features from the PS3. I still have no idea how they got away with that.

I’m not sure there would’ve been any way Sony could’ve managed backwards compatibility with the PS3 on the PS4, short of building a PS3 into the PS4, given the vast architectural differences between the two. It’s only been in the past few years that x86 PCs have become powerful enough to emulate the PS3 well, and I have serious doubts that the Jaguar APU in the PS4 had anywhere near the raw horsepower required to emulate a PS3.

By contrast the Xbox 360 was built with a relatively simple tri-core PPC G5 which mapped to the hardware of the hardware of the Xbox One much better. The OG Xbox was just a Pentium III PC which no doubt made backwards compatibility with it much simpler (just need to virtualize an Xbox).

Microsoft has also had its own share of consumer unfriendliness, like the ridiculously expensive WiFi dongle for the 360 or how the current gen Xbox uses a proprietary expansion card slot for storage upgrades (contrasted with the PS5 which just needs a mid-to-high spec NVMe SSD like you’d put in a PC).

This one was pretty bad:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...

That's not Sony Interactive Entertainment.

PS5 is widely regarded as the best playstation experience since the PS2.

Great backwards compatibility and third-party support.

I don't think the parent comment is referring to PS5's success, but rather things like their recent significant price increases[0] to their PS Plus service, which is required for multiplayer for a lot of their games.

[0] https://www.ign.com/articles/sony-raises-price-of-playstatio...

Exactly this,

Yes the PS5 is successful and they are now making some cocky decisions because of it. I also believe that they made some cocky decisions with the PS5 given how well the PS4 was.

In the same regard they made some decisions with the PS3 because of how well the PS2 did. The exception then was gamers reacted negatively so they were forced to change. This time that is not happening.

They have earned the right to be cocky. XBOX only ever was in the lead for like what maybe 1-3 years in the 360's lifespan? They got that by shipping an incorrect design(360 RROD) to market and consumers paid the price in lost gaming time and lots of frustration due to that mistake.

Every other instance of Microsoft being in this industry is either themselves being cocky (Xbox one launch), releasing a non compelling product, or just plain incompetence.

Just a reminder of who is ultimately responsible for having to pay for multiplayer in the first place: Microsoft. The PC remains the final holdout for for free multiplayer. Since Microsoft owns a sizable portion of the PC tech stack, that may not last forever.

Microsoft could have followed the PC gaming blueprint if they didn't want to pay for the multi-player services.

You just repeat Microsoft's arguments, that's flawed and biased

A little reminder: https://twitter.com/shinobi602/status/1712869694833643528

Since 2018:

- Sony: 10 acquisitions

- Microsoft: 15 acquisitions + 12 with this one, total: 27

How many 1st party games Microsoft have released this gen? How many for Sony? Yeah right.. Don't you think that's where the problem lies?

Is "Sony cocky", or is Microsoft lazy and incompetent?

Sounds like it's the latter + hardcore lobbying (or corruption at this point) all around the world, yet again..

Nintendo "don't compete"? Nintendo "is just in their own 'Nintendo'" space? Oh come on..

https://www.ign.com/games/the-legend-of-zelda-tears-of-the-k...

The internet discourse around this topic has been awful since it naturally attracts the console wars crowd, and people with an axe to grind against one of the console makers.

Personally, I think the entire "console" industry is just a bunch of predatory anti consumer bullshit, and all 3 of those companies should be forced to end a huge list of harmful business practices.

The part that always confuses me is why the heck does the government keep deciding to protect Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo's monopolies? These 3 companies always seem to get special treatment, such as with the DMCA exception and the recent California right to repair exception for game consoles. This literally only protects 3 nonessential entertainment companies, two of which aren't even from the US. The piracy argument doesn't hold up to scrutiny, so I don't get it. ESA lobbyists are probably really good at their jobs I guess.

I think there's a reasonable case to be made that consoles (and the vertically integrated business structure that they represent) inherently encourage more diverse kinds of games development while also attracting new buyers. Their business practices aren't ideal, granted. But it's not entirely clear to me that a walled garden constitutes a true monopoly. That is to say that the console makers aren't using their control over their own systems to force their way into adjacent, unrelated markets.

Also, the standard for what constitutes anti-competitive behaviour is different in the Americas, Europe, and Asia. The US uses higher pricing as the prime signal, whereas the EU uses a lack of viable competitiors.

Agreed. Too many people debating it like arguing for their favorite football team.

It does not matter what the industry is, a 70 billion acquisition from one of the only trillion-dollar companies just is not a good thing.

We live in an unprecedented amount of consolidation, meaning that in every market, there are less and less players competing against each other. How is that a good thing exactly?

i don't think OP meant "don't compete" as in "they're not in the race". i think OP meant that Nintendo just plays their own, slow, long game, focusing on what they want to focus on.

It's strange to see some gamers praise this acquisition as if it will have any positive effect on some of the games they enjoy. In no world will Microsoft decreasing the competition going to be a good thing for consumers.

How familiar are you with Activision?

Because the gaming culture isn't like the FOSS culture.

it should

mainstream gaming is closer to crack addict culture than anything else

once you start exploring gamedev, FGC, or retro gaming cultures, you find more interesting people that care about game mechanics. your average call of duty player would put up with the verification can system if it meant they keep getting their gaming fix.

kpop culture is closer to "crack addict culture" than mainstream gaming.

People should enjoy doing what they like so long as they don't hurt themselves or others

We all die at the end of our lives, so do what you love.

most gamers are just mindless addicts at this point. Activision started releasing almost same game every year and they still buy that game. It even has same name (Call of Duty: Modern Warfare) as old versions without being remastered or sth. Blows my mind.

Chances are games will be added to the gamepass, meaning we get these for essentially free.

I'm more concerned that I won't have access to the games because I don't play on Xbox or Windows.

So you campaigned against Sony buying Bungie too, right?

I thought it was terrible news. But Bungie is so much smaller than ActiBlizz - they have one active franchise in one genre and maybe another one starting soon in roughly the same genre. Meanwhile ActiBlizz has something like a dozen popular franchises.

It's like the difference between Comcast buying a small, local ISP vs. Comcast buying Verizon in terms of scale and number of people impacted.

I've been campaigning against this consolidation since EA bought Westwood in '98.

To be frank, Sony seem to have bought Bungie more for its live service expertise than its IP. Not fond of this direction but it's hard to argue that Sony bought them to starve Microsoft of game releases - Bungie has like one franchise that's so-so in popularity.

I do agree here, but also I think if a company is acquiring to give an even better service to their own users it's a good thing (as one of those users). I'm sure I read they've agreed to keep them cross-platform so it won't impact Playstation users (maybe a delay with new games being released on Playstation, like how FF16 isn't on Xbox yet) - but what I am really hoping for is the games simply become part of the Xbox Ultimate subscription.

For me personally, neither Activision nor Blizzard has released a game I wanted to play since Legacy of the Void (2015). This will not have any impact on how I play games for at least the next 3 years.

I have long term fears that month-to-month game subscriptions will eat the world and in 15 years people pay for games in the same way they currently pay for streaming videos ($10-$20/mo to many content providers).

You can play via cloud streaming on other devices.

That's just playing on Xbox/Windows with extra steps.

> meaning we get these for essentially free.

There is no such thing as "free". We will pay for it later.

I'm paying now. Like $15/mo or so. And I download $300/mo worth of titles. So what's the concern?

That’s called a bait-and-switch. Once physical games are no longer a thing, I would expect to see the GamePass library shrink, the subscription get more expensive, or some other unanticipated switch that drives up the cost. Companies don’t operate at a loss[0] for the benefit of their customers. They’re conditioning players to later extract more value later.

0 - https://www.thegamer.com/microsoft-xbox-game-pass-negatively...

Legislation can prevent these things from happening.

That said, your scenario is probably more likely without a massive cultural shift or the introduction of Ranked choice voting.

The same thing that happened with Netflix. Everybody loved it when it started, now things come in and out of the catalog, quality has gone down, prices have gone up ads have been added, and you need to subscribe to 10 other services as well.

Why are people acting like gamepass is a good thing

Because it is for now. If they mess with it then it'll not be a good deal and folks will leave it.

The first part of all the shit that's bad, is to have a phase where it's good first.

"It's good for now" is just the typical path to it becoming shit.

This is as equally true of "it's shit now and will continue to be". Capitalism demands profits and enshitification ensues. Might as well enjoy what you can while you can.

My guess is that they'll introduce tiers where your current price gets much less access. Presumably this will be done when customers have no where else to go for the titles that they want. Customers will get angry, many tweets will be sent, many articles will be written, maybe MSFT will even issue a statement saying they will pause the plan until they can "better communicate the value to our customers". Then, they will jam the plan thru anyways and their customers will deal with it. This movie is a remake.

Mostly its because Activision/Blizzard is such an obviously shitty terrible company that any deal that sees cool IPs taken out of their hands is seen as a positive thing.

Came here to say this. Activision has been such a poor steward of Blizzard's properties that I find them largely unplayable. It may be unlikely that Microsoft will course correct away from data-drive, engagement-focus mtx games, but I know Activision never will.

Rumor is that Bobby is stepping down once the acquisition closes, which is a good start.

He is gone on the 01.01.2024, until then he remains CEO

Maybe from an artistic perspective, but not from a financial one. It will inevitably mean gamers will spend more money for less game. They might hide it will with their game renting service and microtransactions, but if this was not the case there would be no reason for them to acquire Activision Blizzard in the first place. They see some way to profit by reducing competition.

It is _possible_ that their rental bundle results in a better deal for a reasonable segment of the market than the aggregate of one-off title purchases would be. Though the lock-in means if they jack up the price it might become a poor deal after the fact. Or if you are the kind of person that would purchase fewer games than the total subscription fees would cost, it also wouldn't be better. But sometimes bundling is indeed a better deal for consumers.

As a gamer, I'm most interested in the artistic perspective.

Which games has MS shown good stewardship of?

Halo is a shell of what it once was and has snubbed the players with false promises in recent iterations (couch co-op used to be a staple of Halo but they reneged on their promise to include it with the latest).

AFAIK they haven't had any good exclusive IP for Xbox in a while. They've had a few dynamite hits (ex. Sunset Overdrive) but haven't followed up on any that I'm aware of.

Exclusive IPs aren’t and shouldn’t be a marker of good stewardship.

IMO, exclusives are one of the biggest issues with game systems nowadays, especially now that consoles are basically just reskinned and optimized computers.

Age of Empires, for one. Thoughtful updates and remastered versions that aren’t priced like new games. Then new games that are actually worth the update. Can’t wait for that same ethos to be applied to Warcraft.

I love SC2 and think it is one of the best esport games. However it is considered a "classic game" for Blizzard and they have a skeleton crew maintaining it. Funding for professional events has been decreasing consistently and especially reduced in 2023. There was a recent controversial balance patch that highlighted problems with community interaction and communication -- and no one knows how soon until a new patch might be deployed. (While it's also true that most fears by players are overblown). Basically, the whole community just holds its breath hoping things continue as they are and the other shoe never drops on a 13 year old game.

Best case scenario is that Microsoft embraces these properties and revitalizes them without ruining the game in the process. Worst case is they kill it completely...

I’m not sure what Blizzard’s strategy with esports is (or now Microsoft’s), but they basically imploded the official Overwatch league by being extremely ambiguous about whether or not it would continue, buying out franchise contracts to leave the league, and leaving Twitch for YouTube.

Microsoft definitely takes the Halo esports scene seriously, so running an esport well is definitely in their skillset. Hopefully those people are paying attention and want to get promoted.

Forza is pretty good

Sunset Overdrive was a single game publishing contract with Insomniac Games best known for its Sony second party games and now entirely owned by Sony since 2019 (just after Sunset Overdrive). Microsoft can't follow up on Sunset Overdrive.

>Halo is a shell of what it once

I don't think this is a point against Microsoft, they owned both Halo and Bungie during the golden era. The quality dropped off sharply once Bungie decided to work on other projects and Microsoft had to put together a new team to replace them. If they're still capable of supporting game studios however they did with Bungie, it could be exactly what Blizzard needs.

I don't know if you count it as a game, but Flight Simulator? Sure there was a decade or so when nothing happened, but I think they more than made up for that.

I've argued about this deal on Twitter at length, and the prevailing sentiment of those who favor this acquisition comes down to one thing, and one thing only: getting more AAA games "for free" on Gamepass. Discovering why these people call this an "increase in competition" will be an exercise for future generations of intelligence researchers.

Can't wait for the wailing and gnashing of teeth when the free ride ends and Microsoft starts turning the screws on their (now captive) audience.

I give it a few years before GamePass is as much a month as a full price game and the only way to make it a good deal is to convince yourself they you were going to buy at least one full priced game a month anyway.

I can only speak for myself. I was pretty keen on starcraft and starcraft 2 back in the day, and I made a decision a few years back that blizzard wasn't the sort of company I wanted to support with my money anymore.

Before or after the Activision aquisition?

I never played WoW, but I think every other game up to D3 is a masterpiece.

I don't know about the other fellow, but for me it was when they banned Blitzchung and revoked his prize money for saying "Liberate Hong Kong" on a stream.

One thing I see as an ancient PC Gamer is that Activision also sits on one of the largest hoards of IPs. Not just "cool" IPs from today's games (a lot of people are mentioning Activision's odd/bad stewardship of Blizzard, of course), but Activision bought a lot of the classic publishers in its history as a massive M&A shop. The legacies of Infocom, Sierra, Knowledge Adventure, Davidson, and many more both well known and almost forgotten to history developers and publishers have all been locked into Activision's forgetful vaults. It's such a huge swath of classic PC games. Some of that catalog Activision eventually allowed onto at least GOG (with GOG allegedly doing a lot of the preservation work to make them run), if not Steam, but there's still so much of gaming history that Activision has either claimed to have lost (No One Lives Forever, as one commonly discussed franchise) or just seems disinterested in the IP they own because they can't figure out how to build mobile games from it.

I don't know if Microsoft will be a better custodian of all that gaming history, but as the company most synonymous with the PC today, maybe they will. (If so, among other possibilities PC Game Pass could get very interestingly different from Xbox Game Pass.)

Are you saying I might see Torrin's Passage 2 now?

I also kind of wish to see that. Al Lowe is beyond retired at this point, but maybe Microsoft money can buy at least outlines of his four (!) proposed sequels.

Can you imagine a Leisure Suit Larry in 2023

I regret to inform you that the most recent original Leisure Suit Larry game, "Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Dry Twice," came out in 2020 (2021 on console, 2022 on mobile).

Wow

If you're making a Larry game that's tame enough to be allowed on mobile/console stores, why even bother at that point.

I used to love their games, the past decade has been nothing but a slog for them. I'm hoping M$ might be able to turn some of that around.

Because it means more games for GamePass and Geforce NOW.

I've only ever seen gamers grouse about this acquisition fwiw

Then you haven't spent any time on Twitter.

The relevant competition is between Xbox and PlayStation exclusive titles. Xbox has essentially no exclusive titles that are any good, while PlayStation has many. It will make Xbox more competitive, theoretically. Though I don’t think Activision Blizzard has any great games these days anyway.

I think at least as far as Blizzard is concerned the prevailing mood amongst players is given the current state of their games, chances are any change would be better than no change.

Like MS has a good track record with improving studios they acquire ... Studios under them seem to succeed despite them not because of them.

MSFT as an employer and work environment has industry standard (very good) ESG / DEI stuff, and work life balance is apparently excellent.

Contrast with Activision's stewardship of grinding their workers in to bloody dust, and sprinkling sexual abuse on top. Kotic has to go. Before this acquisition became a news story the news was full of employee lawsuits and California itself initiating action against the awful management.

If life gets considerably better for Blizzard workers under new leadership, they can make better products.

The sexual abuse scandal is what finally broke me free from World of War craft. I had been playing WoW since the invite only beta.

My gaming backlog is still insanely huge and I won't be going back.

Arguably their best and most succesfull games were produced by hard grinding devs that loved the game they were wotking on and the gamers that played them.

You can feel about ESG/DEI however you wamt, but it has nothing to do with producing great games.

What if you feel that it’s integral to producing good games because it means people who care about it will come work there.

This fetishization of crunch as somehow unavoidable is disgusting.

Or maybe people that don't care about games nor gamers will prefer to work there and spend their time on other things, who's to say?

The 'modern' output is what it is and it was disliked by the majority of the player-base, so much that if it wasn't for re-releases of the old content some of their franchises would be near dead.

Your argument that gaming is getting worse and more popular is absurd on it’s face.

I completely disagree. I’m a long-time gaming enthusiast who has followed Activision, Blizzard, and Microsoft Xbox since their beginnings.

Microsoft has done a singularly great job valuing the communities around games, often more than the companies they acquired.

Activision in particular was the death of Blizzard. They have a poor reputation which is very well deserved. I consider this acquisition a rescue of IP I’d given up on. I’m looking forward to the next chapter under Microsoft.

For context, it’s important to review Microsoft revenue in gaming (a loss) and how they justify it - they see gaming as a brand play. Unlike most AAA corporations in gaming, protecting the brand of their games and studios is far more important to them.

I'm not even worked up about gaming specifically. I just think the FTC is failing horrifically at its job of protecting consumers from monopoly. The SEC is failing on its end too.

Everything will just get slowly worse.

With Microsoft track record of poorly managing its acquisitions, I don't think anything will get meaningfully worse.

if nothing is getting meaningfully worse, why is it considered a poorly managed acquisition then? At best they are neutral and is only changing where the profits of said acquisition flows, rather than changing the acquisition.

I think this is a bit unfair, there's a real significant FTC upswell happening, but they're contending with decades of atrophy and an antitrust lobby that is extraordinarily powerful, not to mention the number of monopoly-friendly judges that are sitting in some of the most vital courts.

And this upswell can easily be squashed in just over a year's time. We are fortunate that any sort of effort is being made.

Atrophy of.....the FTC

> antitrust lobby

you mean protrust lobby :)

Which is why the FTC should break up Sony.

how can you possibly think monopoly is an issue when Microsoft is in clear third place in gaming behind Nintendo and Sony, and theres dozens of large publishers/studios and incredibly strong and thriving indie scene. I just dont get what you're talking about.

It is the purpose of copyright, explicitly, to incentivize creative work with the promise of monopoly power over its distribution. So it's a bit disingenuous to assert that microsoft is not a monopoly because other game companies exist.

Tech companies have long understood, and in fact may be entirely predicated upon the understanding that you can leverage one monpoly to create another.

If I make a game that can only run on your platform, then you gain a monopoly on platforms that can run that game. These platforms then become not fungible, and therefore de facto monopolies. There is a certain amount of "we haven't tried to port our game to other platforms", which probably shouldn't be an explicit violation of the law, but entering an exclusivity contract with a game studio is, in my opinion, a pretty clear restraint of trade.

All consoles have console exclusives. Nintendo has Mario/Zelda/Metroid/Pokemon, Sony has The Last of Us, and God of War Ragnarok, and others.

If you think I was arguing that Nintendo and sony do not have monopolies, then I believe you misread my argument. This is why I named Microsoft et al.

What I'm trying to say is that games that are differentiators between consoles are common, and this cannot be a basis of blocking such a deal. Indeed, it's no different than applications running only on ARM or x86, or requiring ray-tracing, or a specific Vulkan version support.

I believe if you read my argument, you would see that I explicitly name entering an exclusivity contract as the anticompetitive behavior.

It wasn't fair to blame it on FTC and SEC. The blame is on the US Congress, they have the power to create and enact laws. They also can create law to limits the power of the federal agencies if they want to. They had a lot of opportunities to do something for us and they barely did anything except for corporations. Federal agencies only can do much within the scope of their power and laws.

And yet, how come congress keeps getting the same (or same type) of persons elected?

So in the end, the electorate is not choosing a representative that represents them. Or, these niche concerns are not the concerns of the majority of the electorate.

First Past The Post voting.

With something like Ranked choice voting, competition would be introduced into the electoral system. Making 3rd parties viable will also give a larger percentage of the electorate representation in government. Plus more people will be engaged in the political process.

CGP Grey has a short and informative video on the topic, as well as videos on alternative electoral systems we could use. All his videos on other topics are top notch if you got some free time, check him out.

How we vote is controlled by the states, so we don't need to beg the two mainstream political parties to get this done.

I believe a couple states already have done away with FPTP voting, so it's possible. Alaska and Maine IIRC.

Oregon recently is looking into doing it as well but I am not sure if they passed it yet.

Gaming is about as far from a monopoly as you can get.

Steam basically has a monopoly on PC gaming distro

Steam is overwhelmingly popular with users and publishers alike and so it's enjoying default status with both, but that's the fairest play in capitalism. There's little lock-in (non-transferable licenses and network effects are all I can think of) and I haven't heard of any anticompetitive behavior.

There are many other outlets for distribution, including the plain Jane internet, on all the platforms it's available for. Notably, this includes SteamOS devices like the Steam Deck, something no other console officially offers, as far as I'm aware.

Valve is remarkably fair.

Valve copies an approach of amazon that many (including, I believe, the USG) consider anticompetitive. Namely, requiring those who list on their store to not list for a lower price on other platforms. This prevents competition on price, an issue because valve charges a 30% fee, which many consumers might like to save on.

The best source on this that I could find is from ArsTechnica: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/05/why-lower-platform-fe...

If it can be believed, then they don't appear to have an actual stipulation on this in their contracts, and Valve claims that the dispute isn't over pricing on other platforms but over selling Steam keys at less than the price on the storefront. That's a pretty big difference, if true.

The story also looks at whether publishers pass on savings in platform fees to customers. Naturally, they don't seem to.

If this is what you're referring to, it doesn't seem like a big deal.

I wonder why these distribution channels are converging on 30% of sales. What's with that number in particular?

I actually misread. The lawsuit itself is concerned with selling Steam keys, no claim from "sources close to Valve" necessary.

You can’t really exhibit anti-competitive behaviour if you don’t have any competition to speak of.

But you can, it's what distinguishes an illegal monopoly from a legal one.

And what is Microsoft going to do with this purchase? Seriously, Microsoft is buy all these game studios and fail to utilize them probably. They own all the IP required to do a followup to Fallout New Vegas and NOTHING.

They'll start making nostalgia bait cash grabs soon enough when they think gamers are ripe for it.

That they don't already think gamers are ripe for it shows how bad they are at making games people want to buy/play.

Microsoft will likely just let them keep operating as they do now, providing money and reaping any profits.

They'll only step in directly if the studios are having problems they can't handle themselves, or performing very poorly.

They want the profit, not as much to direct everything on a micro-level.

EDIT: They will of course make more titles Windows/XBox exclusive too, which makes sense considering the investment.

Until enshittification. And then they’ll be hollowed out.

Very unlikely. Again, MS just wants the profits. If a studio is doing well, they don't want to touch it. They want a steady revenue stream.

They'll only step in if the studio is floundering and their couple releases have been flops. Then they'll offer direction, and shut them down if they can't fix it.

That's what we've seen from MS so far, and it makes the most sense from their perspective.

> MS just wants the profits.

Are you sure about that? MS required Starfield to be exclusive after purchasing Bethesda

Well of course. They're spending a lot of money, why wouldn't they make the titles of anything they acquire be Xbox/Windows exclusive? That increases their profits. More people buy Xboxes, more people are on their platform, etc.

They have some contractual obligations that prevent them from doing it for everything, but they'll do it for anything they can.

That's just business sense.

>why wouldn't they make the titles of anything they acquire be Xbox/Windows exclusive?

"[Microsoft] submits that Microsoft has strong incentives to continue making ZeniMax games available for rival consoles (and their related storefronts). [...] Therefore, according to [Microsoft], Microsoft would not have the incentive to cease or limit making ZeniMax games available for purchase on rival consoles."

https://ec.europa.eu/competition/mergers/cases1/202124/m1000...

There may be some edge cases, but frankly I view it as typical corporate BS.

They were just making statements like that hoping that the deal would go through. Everything that they are legally able to, from now on, will most likely be MS exclusive.

What does this mean in this context? Relying on microtransactions to hook whales? Releasing poor/rehashed products? Collecting huge amounts of personal data without permission to play a game that requires none of it?

I think we're way past "until"...

No they want to buy a monopoly since they couldn’t earn one.

How is that incompatible with what I said?

Most of all, MS wants a steady revenue stream. Buying lots of studios helps even out any less profitable titles that come out.

Now, they will likely make more titles Xbox/windows exclusive. That's expected.

> Microsoft will likely just let them keep operating as they do now, providing money and reaping any profits.

Yeah, it's not like Microsoft ever bought a game studio that was making a highly-anticipated game, then made them release it as an XBox / PC Exclusive or anything.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_(franchise)

https://www.halopedia.org/Halo:_Combat_Evolved_for_Macintosh

At the minimum, avoiding getting locked out of console exclusives.

The game of games

Just because they own all the pieces (the Fallout franchise, the engine Bethesda created for F:NV, Obsidian Entertainment) doesn't mean there's a workable concept for the game.

Obsidian put out two games in the past two-ish years: Grounded (a co-op survival shooter) and Pentiment (a point-and-click murder mystery set in the middle ages). Both were well-received. In addition, Obsidian has also announced The Outer Worlds 2, a sequel to a game that (fairly or unfairly) was compared to F:NV.

Pentiment is a masterpiece.

It also never would have been released without gamepass, so we have some evidence that Microsoft acquisitions don't all end terribly

Obsidian has said in interviews that Grounded was also the sort of game that they would pitch and pitch for years and get rejection after rejection and probably wouldn't have happened without Game Pass. No one wanted a "co-op shooter with tower defense elements" from "an RPG company", especially with such a wild setting/theme, but Game Pass let them experiment and play so long as they made some "live service" concessions to get people to dip in/out over multiple months of Game Pass.

Obsidian seems to be thriving under Microsoft, doing all sorts of crazy things that their previous history hinted at that they were capable of but never had the resources or the publisher buy-in to explore. It's fascinating to watch so far. I'm curious to see what they do with the bigger budgets of Avowed and Outer Worlds 2.

They haven’t owned Bethesda for very long so I think it’s fair that they haven’t released a F:NV successor yet. I do suspect that Microsoft may have been behind Starfield releasing in its half-baked, dumbed down state though a la “We need it on game pass by X, make it happen!”

Regarding at least the Blizzard side of the acquisition, I feel like Microsoft ownership may end up being a good thing for their underused IP. Microsoft has strong incentives to release RTS (StarCraft, Warcraft) games to bolster PC usage for gaming and maybe bring more attention to the Windows Store (IMO forcing minecraft onto the Store was a blunder as the upgrade experience was fucking terrible) if they choose to use it.

> I do suspect that Microsoft may have been behind Starfield releasing in its half-baked, dumbed down state though a la “We need it on game pass by X, make it happen!”

The rumor mill suggests the opposite is true. Bethesda intended to ship the game over a year ago and Microsoft delayed it to make sure it wasn't the next No Man's Sky or Cyberpunk.

This aligns with my sense of the culture of these orgs at this point.

Bethesda continues to ride on the ideas of talent hired-and-fired much more than a decade ago.

>Microsoft delayed it to make sure it wasn't the next No Man's Sky or Cyberpunk.

I wish it was the next Cyberpunk. I've gone back and forth between Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 / Phantom Liberty and Starfield, and I like Cyberpunk 2077 so much better. It looks better, it has a way more captivating story, it has so much more interesting characters and it just plays much nicer.

On release, CyberPunk 2077 was so bad that CD Projekt issued an apology and offered refunds. The previous poster's entire point was delaying Starfield to make sure it didn't end up like CyberPunk 1.0. I don't get the comparison between Starfield 1.0 and CyberPunk 2.0.

https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/cyberpunk-2077-glitch-refun...

But Cyberpunk 1.0 was an interesting game even if buggy. Starfield is just not interesting.

To be clear, you don't find it interesting, which is fine, but it certainly was released in a better state than CyberPunk 1.0, which was the only point made. Are you just telling us you don't like Starfield?

You forget that Cyberpunk was absolutely lambasted at launch. The blow back was aggressive enough that Sony/MS/Valve allowed no-questions-asked refunds well after the normal period. The game was even pulled from PSN after launch completely until it was in a betters state. It was a shitshow.

Starfield launch has been bug-free and majestic in comparison.

No, I remember the launch of Cyberpunk 2077 pretty well. Been playing since day one after all. But no matter how bug-free the Starfield launch has been, it still hasn't been a great launch. On Steam, Starfield was only sitting at 84k concurrent players a month after its release. Cyberpunk 2077, despite being lambasted heavily, was sitting at 145k players a month into its release. Starfield is also now the lowest-rated Bethesda game available on Steam [1]. The waning player count and mediocre scores would suggest that no matter how few bugs your game has, if the game isn't interesting, people just aren't going to be interested in it.

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/starfield-is-bethesdas-low...

TBF those #s are honestly almost meaningless at this point.

Re: playercount comparison - Cyberpunk wasn't split between Steam + XBox, and also wasn't 'free' on XBox to lure players there vs Steam.

https://steamcharts.com/app/1091500 Looks like you inflated the # by ~50% regardless; as CP soon dipped under 10k players.

Re: user review score - user reviews on Metacritic/etc are honestly almost meaningless now for any game that does anything to annoy anyone. Starfield pissed off the legion of sony loyalists and has been getting review bombed continuously since well before launch. Dog piles gain traction.

I'm not saying Starfield is the perfect game or has no problems, just that 'worst launch than cyberpunk' is simply insane and revisionist.

>Cyberpunk wasn't split between Steam + XBox

Yeah, it wasn't. It was split between Steam, GOG, Stadia, PlayStation 4 (one of the best-selling consoles of all times), Xbox One, PlayStation 5 (the best-selling console of its generation) and Xbox Series. Starfield on the other hand is split between Steam and PC Xbox and Xbox Series (which has like half the unit sales of the PS5). I don't get why you would argue that Starfield is "more split up" when it's a console exclusive and Cyberpunk 2077 was as multi-platform as it could be.

The best argument you can make is that it's more popular than the numbers would suggest because it was available for "free" – but there's no numbers to back that up since Microsoft doesn't publish them, and usually companies don't publish numbers that make them look bad (look up when they stopped publishing Xbox console sales).

>Looks like you inflated the # by ~50% regardless

No, I just used a source that has more granular data than "monthly". https://steamdb.info/app/1091500/charts/

>as CP soon dipped under 10k players

What, six months after release? How many players did Starfield have six months after release?

>user reviews on Metacritic/etc are honestly almost meaningless now for any game that does anything to annoy anyone. Starfield pissed off the legion of sony loyalists and has been getting review bombed continuously since well before launch. Dog piles gain traction.

Do you have any data to back that up or is this just something that you feel deep up in your ass?

I'll stop replying after this because it's gone outside the realm of a sane conversation, but...

> Yeah, it wasn't. It was split between Steam, GOG, Stadia, PlayStation 4 (one of the best-selling consoles of all times), Xbox One, PlayStation 5 (the best-selling console of its generation) and Xbox Series. Starfield on the other hand is split between Steam and PC Xbox and Xbox Series (which has like half the unit sales of the PS5). I don't get why you would argue that Starfield is "more split up" when it's a console exclusive and Cyberpunk 2077 was as multi-platform as it could be.

You're conflating irrelevances. You're talking specifically about Steam player count. Cyberpunk on PC was Steam and Epic. Both at same price. At launch, Starfield on PC at launch was split between Steam (70usd) and XBox App (0usd for ~30m GP subs, or ~16/mo). Of course GP will take a bigger chunk sales from Starfield as if you don't expect to play a game forever, it's cheaper to buy GamePass and play it for 4 months than to buy it on Steam.

> I do suspect that Microsoft may have been behind Starfield releasing in its half-baked, dumbed down state

Bethesda has been consistently simplifying their games since Morrowind and I don't think they've ever had smooth launch.

While it's true Microsoft rushes many releases, I don't think they're entirely to blame in this case

> I do suspect that Microsoft may have been behind Starfield releasing in its half-baked, dumbed down state though a la “We need it on game pass by X, make it happen!”

In fairness to Microsoft, "half-baked" would be how I describe all of Bethesda's previous releases as well. I don't think Starfield is that far off how Skyrim or Fallout 4 was on release. Starfield's a long shot from where Skyrim and Fallout are now after years of patches and DLC, but I think not far from where they started.

> Regarding at least the Blizzard side of the acquisition, I feel like Microsoft ownership may end up being a good thing for their underused IP. Microsoft has strong incentives to release RTS (StarCraft, Warcraft) games to bolster PC usage for gaming and maybe bring more attention to the Windows Store (IMO forcing minecraft onto the Store was a blunder as the upgrade experience was fucking terrible) if they choose to use it.

Blizzard needs focus, though time will tell if Microsoft can help with that.

Overwatch is a mess right now. The release of Overwatch 2 has gone poorly. The balance is poor. They only do patches like twice a quarter, so it feels like they always have to make very conservative changes because who knows how this change interacts with the 30 other ones in the patch notes. It means heroes that are broken or unplayable tend to stay so for months on end. The pro league is in shambles in the best case, and dead in the worst and most likely. They've been losing players. PvE never really launched, and now they're charging extra for the shitty scraps that came out of it.

Diablo 4 is basically dead. 5 million players on launch, 300k last month. They're down to ~5% of the players they started with a year after launch. The core gameplay was not fun, and I can't believe no one noticed it forever ago.

WoW is WoW, but it's stale. The most exciting thing they've done in ages was re-releasing old versions of the game. They're basically just waiting to get upended by something actually innovative.

At this point, I love Blizzard's characters and worlds, but I think their games are D tier. They have the half-finished feel of a Bethesda game, but they don't have any of the fun. They don't resemble the same Blizzard that originally released SC2 and WoW.

> Diablo 4 is basically dead. 5 million players on launch, 300k last month. They're down to ~5% of the players they started with a year after launch. The core gameplay was not fun, and I can't believe no one noticed it forever ago.

Diablo 4 was launched less than ~4 months ago. Feels much longer. lol.

As has been said, these companies are a shell of what they used to be. The real meat were the sublime developers and craftsmen that are no longer in those companies.

> > I do suspect that Microsoft may have been behind Starfield releasing in its half-baked, dumbed down state though a la “We need it on game pass by X, make it happen!” > In fairness to Microsoft, "half-baked" would be how I describe all of Bethesda's previous releases as well. I don't think Starfield is that far off how Skyrim or Fallout 4 was on release. Starfield's a long shot from where Skyrim and Fallout are now after years of patches and DLC, but I think not far from where they started.

Jedi Survivor has been out for 6 months and it's still got major problems. Imagine being in the middle of a saber battle and the game stops responding to your attack key/button. I've paused the game, gone into Control Panel, tested that my controller is still good, gone back to the game, it just won't respond to the command. And then suddenly it will start again. Same with any button, they randomly fail. And it's got to compile all the shaders EVERY time you launch the game, no caching. All AAA game studios push out broken games on launch.

> And it's got to compile all the shaders EVERY time you launch the game, no caching.

Man, I've never been happier to use Steam on Linux. Since every game's shaders are transpiled to Vulkan, the Steam Vulkan shader cache works for games with this kind of BS problem even if they were written for DirectX

> In fairness to Microsoft, "half-baked" would be how I describe all of Bethesda's previous releases as well. I don't think Starfield is that far off how Skyrim or Fallout 4 was on release. Starfield's a long shot from where Skyrim and Fallout are now after years of patches and DLC, but I think not far from where they started.

I've got friends that go deep into Bethesda releases on launch and they all agree that Starfield was much more polished than Skyrim or Fallout 4 (or Fallout 76) at launch. They are convinced that Microsoft must have actually attacked Bethesda with QA resources.

It's seems to be better from a bug perspective, but it's still the same shallow experience. Which is now even more noticeable in 2023.

I sincerely hope that MS will put a lot of time in to make the next elder scrolls good, but my money is on another flop.

WoW oscillates. It gets stale, then becomes fun again, and repeats. It's been going and actively developed for 20 years, which is incredible; if that cycle keeps operating for another 10 years for any reason it would be incredible.

Forget Starfield, anyone remember the disastrous Redfall release earlier this year?

Bethesda has been synonymous with janky game launches for decades. They practically invented it.

> They haven’t owned Bethesda for very long so I think it’s fair that they haven’t released a F:NV successor yet.

Word on the street is that the principals at the top of Obsidian and Bethesda still hate each other, Microsoft keeps them at arms distance, and Obsidian isn't in a rush to do a new Fallout game even if "Daddy Microsoft" forced Bethesda to share its toys with the other studios (just like "Daddy Interplay" used to do, which is part of what led to the mess of Obsidian, inXile, and Bethesda all having crazy drama with each other before Microsoft became the new Interplay of RPG company owners).

I think that Obsidian's Outer Worlds was a very good F:NV successor. It had most of the hallmarks of the Fallout universe, just tweaked with a bit more space sci-fi and a weirder sense of humor. One of the interesting things about Starfield to me is how often I'm comparing it to Outer Worlds (and how often it feels like Outer Worlds was the better more coherent story/RPG in a similar way to F:NV fans like to compare Fallout 3/4 on either side of F:NV).

See having completed Outer Worlds and also comparing it to Starfield, I’ve enjoyed both but Starfield feels much bigger while Outer Worlds feels smaller but deeper. The sheer scale of planets on Starfield runs pretty well. I’d love to have those two teams combined again for a great game.

Arguably the teams aren't combined since they have such disparate priorities/preferences. Obsidian wants to go deep and Bethesda wants to go wide and shallow, those are the kinds of games they both prefer to build. (Or at least that's how they seem from outside perspectives.) It certainly would be incredible to see some games try for more interesting compromises of "both", but it's also incredibly hard to project manage and budget and build if you are trying to go both deep and wide at the same time. Maybe Microsoft will find a way to do it at some point.

(As something of an aside/tangent, as a failed game developer I've always wished for the ability to "scout" locations in other people's games. Hollywood keeps a number of backlots of standing sets that just about anyone can rent to use. Plus real world cities can be shot by anyone looking to fill out the right permits. But games still rarely to never "share backlots" and game players and reviewers/critics still generally "punish" games that do [compare reviews of Saints Row 3 and Saints Row 4, for instance]. Imagine if movies got bad reviews every time they were set in New York. "Can you believe yet another movie set in New York? How uncreative," said no one ever. It could be incredible if as a game story writer I could "shoot" a deep story somewhere in Starfield. Sure mods exist and sort of fill that role some of the time, but mods still have that too strongly bound association with the parent game [can't sell it standalone] and monetization for mods is still complicated and players/reviewers/critics still look down on their noses for mods. "Imagine if this modder had built their own game for this story how much better it could have been?" That story might not exist to be told without "sets and costumes" to easily borrow as a foundation. I don't have any easy solutions to this conflict between wide and deep games, but I do think more access and better reviews for people trying to write deep stories in someone else's wide sandbox could be a start.)

Really interesting concept. Maybe we’ll begin to see more of that once something like Unreal Engine 5 dominates the market.

They've owned Bethesda for a couple years, what are you expecting? They put out Starfield, New elder scrolls is in pre-production, and have said a new Fallout is next.

it is also about buying users for their ecosystem, "life lock in". my kid is already a microsoft user with an ms account, just because she wants to play minecraft. consider all the other usecases she will 'slide' into, because she already has that ms live/office365 account.

I'm sure it's more complicated than this, but I still hold a grudge against MS for seemingly destroying Rare. I never really looked into it but at a younger age I understood MS bought them and then they never made another actual Banjo game, which I always assumed wouldn't have happened sans acquisition.

I thought this article (https://www.eurogamer.net/who-killed-rare) was pretty insightful.

Rare still exists and I think seems to be at the top of their game.

Nuts & Bolts was a good Banjo game and close enough to "actual" for me. Sure, all the "building" mechanics were silly, but all the classic platforming was still there and the building mechanics just added more collectathons to series infatuated with collectathons. That felt very true to Banjo-Kazooie to me.

Rare's love affair with Kinect and building a lot of Kinect games would have never been questioned if it was a love affair with the Wii in the same time.

Similarly, overlooked treasures like Kameo and Viva Pinata would probably have tons of fans if they had released on Nintendo platforms.

Rare Replay reminded me that Rare has done three big pirate games in their history plus one of the most beloved sections of Banjo-Kazooie is pirate themed, so Sea of Thieves is just about the "Most Rare" that Rare has ever been. It's a delightful game and deserves the following that it has now. Hopefully "Safer Seas" in December will open up Sea of Thieves for more children and family play and for more players that can't yet see past the open-PvP to all the delightful Rare details and treasures inside.

I surely didn't give Bolts a fair shake, and never played any other titles after feeling I "lost" Banjo. I certainly need to try some of their other titles. Thanks for the recs

It hasn't been anywhere near long enough to ask what Microsoft is doing or has done with that IP, they JUST got their hands on it.

A Fallout 3 remaster is in the works.

https://www.ign.com/articles/oblivion-remaster-fallout-3-rem...

My theory is Mobile gaming (King) was the key here.

Outside of that it's simply to try and narrow the (surprisingly large) Exclusives gap Sony has been enjoying the last decade or so.

> They own all the IP required to do a followup to Fallout New Vegas and NOTHING

I mean - didn't the team that would work on that launch Starfield in the last month?

> I mean - didn't the team that would work on that launch Starfield in the last month?

Yep. Although one could argue there are are other studios who could be tapped to make a sequel.

No, actually. New Vegas was not developed by Bethesda. It was published by Bethesda. It was developed by Obsidian which Microsoft also owns.

Starfield was developed by Bethesda Game Studios. Fallout: New Vegas was developed by Obsidian Entertainment and published by Bethesda Softworks.

> And what is Microsoft going to do with this purchase?

MSFT will ensure that every possible MSFT product is adopted by the entire Activision organization.

Aren't you being ever so slightly myopic? That is one game out of literal dozens.

As a side note, this means that Microsoft now owns the copyrights to all of Infocom's interactive fiction: Zork, Enchanter, Deadline, HHGttG, etc.

Quake, Wolfenstein, elite force*

*may have paramount cbs locking that up but Raven comes back to the family with id now

They already owned those when they bought Zenimax, who bought id (except for the Trek games).

Also, Sierra (King's Quest, Space Quest, Gabriel Knight, etc), Knowledge Associates (lots of ancient Edutainment IP, including Mario Teaches Typing and Mario is Missing!), Davidson (Math Blaster and other Edutainment IP), and more. Activision was a massive M&A shop of classic PC games history.

Not HHGttG. After a time, the rights reverted back to the author of the original work (Douglas Adams). Same for the Shogun adaptation.

Microsoft under Satya has really stepped up. Gaming is now larger than TV and Movies in terms of revenue. I know their cloud rollout didn't work as anticipated, but if they get this acquisition right they will have a money printer for the next decade.

Kind of true, however Microsoft under Satya really killed the Windows desktop, burned bridges with the Windows developer community, that now has decided to re-focus on Win32, Windows Forms and WPF, ignoring pretty much anything else.

Windows is still the best alternative to expensive Macs (on mosty countries for common folks), or the Year of Desktop Linux right around the corner, but not thanks to Satya.

I'd say that Windows and Office are the two areas that Satya didn't really touch or influence in much of any way and mostly let continue on autopilot as he focused on every other area of Microsoft.

Disagree on the Office part, he is clearly behind the push to bring everyone using the Azure version of Office, and the subscription model.

Satya's entire strategy seems to be going all in on turning microsoft into the one stop shop enterprise productivity SAAS company. Office is their main product at this point. I don't see how you can say he didn't touch or influence it.

brilliant leadership? considering that overall Games out-grossed Movies about 15 years ago.. that trend only continued when the largest Game rollout of all time beat the largest Movie rollout of all time.. that has happened multiple times in 10 years.

God damn man. How is this not an antitrust violation? The only answer is that we live in truly corrupt times. What is our answer to this?

I’m convinced we’ve always had corruption, it’s just seeing more of the light today.

I mention this to my Eastern European friends and they laugh at the level of corruption the US complains about (compared to what they’ve had for decades+)

> this to my Eastern European friends and they laugh at the level of corruption the US

These days I’m not that sure that the case (only talking about the Eastern European countries in the US)

But that's a big part of why the US is as successful as it is. A culture against corruption. It's very hard to get rid of it once it entrenches itself, which is why people complain about it.

Where is the corruption here? I agree that there are many corrupt parts of government, especially in procurement, and especially in regional and local governments, but in this specific case it's pretty clear that the law is on the side of Microsoft here.

What is the antitrust behavior here?

the antitrust behavior is two of the largest players in the gaming space combining. how is that going to promote competition? it's just going to make it easier for them to outspend and outlast and eventually ingest it's competition

Sony's gaming revenue is ~26 B

8 % of MSFT's revenue is from gaming = ~15 B

Nintendo 12 B

ABK 8 B

EA 7.5 B

( and that isn't including tencent and netease. i didn't bother trying to find figures for them but they are in the running here too )

So you're worried about them selling games at a loss until the other game studios go out of business?

Number 4 and 6 are merging to become number 3.

Microsoft has one of the two biggest gaming subscription services. They would like to see gaming be a subscription business. When they say, we will still sell Call of Duty on other platforms they don't say that they will give it away on GamePass.

What's wrong with subscriptions? It lets a distributor scrape off the excess profit. Games are a hit driven business. It sounds great when a platoform offers two or three times the cost of development to a developer, but the model won't really work unless some titles make like 10x. Listen to Jason Blum explain why Netfilx is terrible for independent film.

You will just see a lot less independent developers (not hobbyists) and small publishers. Maybe no one cares. I will probably be retired by then.

Microsoft produces video games. They acquired another company that produces video games. How is this antitrust?

The merger of two large entities in the same market is a pretty clear example of something that should raise antitrust concerns.

I disagree because Microsoft doesn't hold some unique barrier to entry into video game production the way they do an operating system.

You can argue that this specific case doesn't rise to the level that would actually result in anti-competitive results. My point was just that the merger of two large companies is the kind of thing that deserves scrutiny, because your comment implied that it couldn't even in theory have antitrust concerns.

Why? Two large corporations merging isn’t in itself antitrust. In some cases an industry is in decline and it makes a lot of sense for large companies to merge otherwise both might go out of business (clearly not what’s going on here, but just an example).

It did raise concerns and it was reviewed by multiple bodies around the world, with many concessions made. Do you believe every single review body got it wrong on the facts?

Microsoft doesn't have anything close to a monopoly on games. In terms of sales and reviewer scores, most of the top games weren't produced by Activision or other Microsoft studios. The only recent release I'm aware of was Starfield, and that was panned for failing to meet expectations, achieving under 88 on Metacritic.

How is buying up two of the biggest game studios not anti-competitive behavior? The apologism in this comment is hilarious. I hope your getting paid for shilling this hard.

i mean, europe didn't think it was a monopoly or close to anti-trust. same with all other countries.

hell, CMA only complained about the cloud business.

FTC tried to do something, but failed so spectacularly that even the judge had to say "you have to defend customers, not sony".

Because the person you responded to just answered that question?

It is because Microsoft isn't anywhere close to being a monopoly in games.

You could have just read the comment to get the answer to your question.

It's not a monopoly but I think it's fair to express frustration towards the lack of legislation preventing what's clearly anti-competitive behavior. It doesn't seem very helpful for people to continually state what the current laws are as if that makes this better somehow.

How is it stopping anyone from coming in and competing? It's not like they're selling games at a loss to kill the competition.

They’re giving them away for a small monthly fee with their console subscription. How the hell is this any different, if not worse, than the anti-competitive behavior that Microsoft was brought to court for in the 90s?

So you think that Microsoft is going to run their gaming business at a loss until all the other gaming studios go out of business, then jack up the prices?

If not, I don't see what the problem is.

It isn't anti-completive to simply sell a product for a better price unless you are dumping (selling under cost to drive competitors out of business).

> So you think that Microsoft is going to run their gaming business at a loss until all the other gaming studios go out of business, then jack up the prices?

i wish people realize that king is probably earning more than activision and blizzard combined.

and guess what? king is a mobile app company, nothing to do with xbox's main business.

That's a really good point. It's also weird to talk about the customer impact of monopolies when the cash cow is garbage free to play games

> How the hell is this any different

it is significantly different because back then Microsoft was close to being a monopoly in the relevant market.

Thats the difference. Microsoft is not that in video games right now.

Giving stuff away for free or cheap and bundling is completely fine if the company doing it isn't even close to being a monopoly.

> than the anti-competitive behavior that Microsoft was brought to court for in the 90s?

The anti competitive behavior that they were brought to court for was not bundling.

Instead, it was for being close to a monopoly while also engaging in bundling.

Bundling is only anti-competitive if the company doing it is close to being a monopoly.

Show me where I mentioned the word monopoly. You can’t, because I said anti-competitive.

Ok, and it is not anti-competitive because microsoft isn't anywhere close to being a monopoly.

Thats the answer to the question. This answer was already given to you.

Why do you insist on throwing the red herring “monopoly?” You don’t have to be a monopoly to be anti-competitive. Again, Microsoft was not a “monopoly” in the 90s when they were trust busted.

> Why do you insist on throwing the red herring “monopoly?”

It is not a red herring.

Instead, it is the most important factor for determining if something is illegally anticompetitive.

* if a company does not have a large enough percentage of the market, then many actions become completely legal* <------ (hint. This is the central point and is completely uncontroversial)

> Again, Microsoft was not a “monopoly” in the 90s

It had over 70% of the relevant market.

According to court precedent ,that is absolutely within the definition of having monopoly power.

And Microsoft has no where close to that amount of monopoly power for anti trust laws to apply.

> You don’t have to be a monopoly to be anti-competitive.

You quite literally do have to have a large enough percentage of the market for something to be anti competitive.

If you do not have a large percentage of the market, then whole swaths of things are not illegal, that would be illegal if a large market share firm did the same action.

Is it literally a factor that determines if anti trust law applies.

This isn't controversial.

Feel free to look up all the information on the FTC website, if you actually care.

https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...

> Microsoft doesn't have anything close to a monopoly on games.

The whole monopoly argument doesn't work, we'll just end up with duopolies, or perhaps triopolies. See iOS vs Android.

What we need is an adjustment of the rules, where e.g. the top 10 companies instead of the top 1 company are treated as a monopoly from an antitrust point of view.

This will give consumers more to choose from.

You might be interested in reading about what defines a cartel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartel

I don't think we're anywhere near close to that in the videogame industry.

The most recent Microsoft Studios release was Forza Motorsport a few days ago, with the next big Activision thing being the perennial CoD next month. (Which as an aside is still coming to PS4/Xbox One)

Because it really isn't a violation of antitrust as is currently defined.

Linda Khan's article here is, IMO, one of the best overviews of why: https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-parado...

What's frustrating is that this requires legislative change, which, given the current political climate, seems like a sisyphean task.

We'll just keep rolling through the 21st century with horribly outdated laws on every front, because the government can't function well enough to change them

Expecting Microsoft to reinvigorate the various Activision/Blizzard franchises seems like wishful thinking to me. The priority would more like be optimizing the games for the XBox platform. IMO, the rise of the gaming console has been a net negative for deep, complex games on the PC, examples like Crusader Kings notwithstanding. The earlier generation of PC gamers grew up on Avalon Hill strategy games, Strat-o-Matic, D&D, chess, and the like. We were used to complexity and looked for it in games. Recent generations, generally, are less depth focused. Since retiring, I don't have a staff of 20 something programmers to keep me apprised of gaming developments. Most of what I get is from here and other reading. Yes, there are exceptions. Folks here have stated that Paradox tends to make games that verge on obtuse complexity. I'm sure there are some new original games out there, but generally clones and remastered oldies seem to dominate the market and the headlines. Personally, I wouldn't expect much from Microsoft. And sooner or later, companies generally will realize that the cloud is not their friend.

https://archive.ph/ekMsw

Why? Microsoft is a trillion dollar company. If they want to compete, they can afford to.

Approval isn't based on whether or not they can afford to compete without the acquisition, it's based on whether or not the acquisition will meaningfully reduce competition.

Each competition authority has their own criteria.

But in this case, it will meaningfully reduce competition. For some reason UK's CMA only considered cloud gaming, which is a weird fixation. Maybe because it's an emerging market?

If all Activison Blizzard games become Xbox exclusive will reduce competition and screw consumers, yet that was dropped as a concern for who knows what reason.

Likely because they thought it was the one they were most likely to be able to win; these are usually pretty narrowly focused.

I just don't see how it meaningfully reduces competition. This barely moves the needle. If I look at the top sellers on Steam, the vast majority are not Activision Blizzard.

You mean the games that are sold on battle.net aren't being tracked by steam?

So you'd rather just miss the point, ok.

It doesn't matter how much revenue Battle.net makes for them. The multitude of developers and publishers that are successful on Steam show that AB is irrelevant to the market. If AB owned a significant number of the top 50, it'd be a different story, but they don't.

Never ignore corruption as a possible reason. Microsoft and the UK government are very chummy.

How could the acquisition of one solvent company by another in the same field not reduce competition? The UK seems to have gotten some token divestiture out of this in the name of not reducing competition too much in a particular area, but merging of competitors by its very nature reduces competition.

If there are 100 roughly comparable companies, a merger happens, and 99 remain, the competition decreased, but the landscape is still competitive.

If there are 3 roughly comparable companies that control 90% of the market, the competition is already low; if two of them merged, very little competition would remain. A duopoly is not as bad as a monopoly, but is still pretty far from an "efficient market".

>If there are 100 roughly comparable companies, a merger happens, and 99 remain, the competition decreased, but the landscape is still competitive.

But still less competitive than it was. So why allow a company like Microsoft to make the field less competitive when it could afford to compete instead of buying its competitors? I think a company even half as large or profitable as Microsoft should have to present a pretty damn compelling case before being allowed to make any acquisition at all let alone that of one of their competitors.

You should “allow” MS to make acquisitions because it’s their money and they should be able to spent it however they choose, within the constraints of the law.

Your desire to block acquisitions in general is a dangerous one. Doing so, basically kills venture capital markets, and then we get far fewer startups, less innovative disruption and more entrenched market leaders.

What if a company goes out of business, and fewer remain? Should it be even allowed to close? :)

Mergers are different because they create fewer giants in the place where more smaller companies used to be. In extreme cases, it may have seriously bad consequences for broader public, and this is a reason to prevent a merger, or even split a monopoly. But this should be a rather extraordinary event.

Why isn't a company with a revenue roughly the same as the country of Belgium merging with a competitor a rather extraordinary event?

It is, it happens infrequently, and always is subject to scrutiny.

(Belgium, with all due respect, is not very large.)

Why not? It's a video game not a critical resource

Depends on who you talk to. More people have problems today with gaming than ever

Capitalism leads to monopolies. They are competing. They have deeper pockets than Sony or Nintendo. Now they own CoD, WoW, and Candy Crush.

So Basically only EA and Ubisoft remains as big publisher.

What, that's not enough competition for checks notes the whole fuckin planet?

Me when I learn about the music industry

Square Enix, Embracer, Capcom, Take-Two, Sega, Bandai Namco,

Sony?? Tencent?

Riot Games, Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, Capcom, Sega, Bandai Namco, EA, Valve, Square Enix, Nexon, Ubisoft, Konami, Embracer, and some others. Not including all the Chinese publishers.

CD Projekt Red?

2 of the biggest games ever belongs to them (Witcher and Cyberpunk)

CD Projekt Red isn't a publisher, it's a developer. CD Projekt is a publisher.

And arguably having two IPs, both which are not original IPs, is not that huge.

>CD Projekt Red isn't a publisher, it's a developer. CD Projekt is a publisher.

Is this distinction important here?

>And arguably having two IPs, both which are not original IPs, is not that huge.

They know how to create huuuge hype and good products and that's what matters.

EA has been screwing up imo one of their biggest ups - command and conquer since they purchased it. Thankfully they've let fans run the show for the most part. I did enjoy cnc3 however 4 is a mistake and their subsequent attempts to do generals 2 have been flops

So, granted, one big company is buying another big company and consolidating a decent chunk of the market for multiplayer fps games. Fewer platforms means fewer people play a certain kind of game with the benefit of less development for lower quality ports.

Other than the fact that AAA companies can cut costs from this I'm not so sure about what people are negative on this one. So if you don't want to buy a PC or get an Xbox, but you really like CoD, you might be out of luck eventually. I would think that what we're really concerned about is whether indie studios can get off the ground and create new experiences.

Activision is a lot bigger than CoD with Warcraft, Diablo, StarCraft, etc each have huge followings. So not only does it impact players of a huge chunk of game series, plus any potential future series by Activision but also the viability of alternative platforms.

Thus, even pure indy gamers are being harmed here. Worse it’s yet another sign that US regulators have no intentions of limiting monopolistic behavior.

Roughly 82% of their revenue comes from Call of Duty, Warcraft, and Candy Crush. I'm not sure what the actual breakdown is from there, but they're not exactly diversified.

https://www.axios.com/2022/03/03/embattled-activision-facing...

That ~20% varies by year but is still ~1.5 Billion dollars per year which is a major studio representing a long tail of properties that come out infrequently. More importantly you need to consider future franchises not just their current properties:

Caesar, Crash Bandicoot, Diablo, DJ Hero, Empire Earth, Gabriel Knight, Geometry Wars, Guitar Hero, Gun, Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm, Hexen, Interstate ’76, King’s Quest, Laura Bow Mysteries, The Lost Vikings, Overwatch, Phantasmagoria, Pitfall, Police Quest, Prototype, Quest for Glory, Singularity, Skylanders, Solider of Fortune, Space Quest, Spyro the Dragon, StarCraft, Tenchu, TimeShift, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, True Crime, Zork, and probably a few others I missed.

UKs opinions are meaningless today.

All a bit embarrassing really.

Why? What did I miss?

The deal was accepted by every country but UK. Now the climb down.

the US FTC case is still ongoing, however unlike the CMA they don't seem to have statutory powers to prevent the merger

if the FTC wins Microsoft would have to spin Activision out

Hopefully they can eat the IP and sell the shell

I have to confess I'm not really up to speed on the situation but, from the article...

> However, last month the watchdog said a revised deal that included selling cloud gaming rights outside Europe to Activision Blizzard’s French rival Ubisoft had addressed its concerns, indicating the tie-up would be approved.

Was this as a result of CMA's pressure, or would it have happened anyway?

(If it wouldn't have happened anyway, it doesn't feel like a climb down to me?)

Yes, it was concession caused by CMA's stance.

People are so excited for cloud gaming, and Xbox Game Pass growing now... The price will continue to go up up up up up up. I remember when YouTube TV was $35/mo now it's $73/mo. Game Pass and all cloud gaming will slowly cost more until it's close to 1/2 the price a month of a game, and slowly creep up from there. Sad.

I'm not excited for cloud gaming.

Really, try GOG. You can download and install skyrim, and play it offline with no DRM or cloud/online/advertising/tracking nonsense.

Not only will the price go up, they will have worse content and Premium Passes.

I still don't get how $69B is a reasonable deal. Acti-Blizzard have been making 7-8B net the last few years, so it will take MS 10 years assuming constant returns just to break even. Why is it a good deal, especially in gaming. What does MS want with the customer base?

This is a very naive way of looking at M&A activities.

What I've gathered over the past year (e.g. press coverage of documents uncovered during these proceedings) is that the Xbox ecosystem is falling behind Sony by quite some margin. This is presumably just to protect the business they already have, by scaling out and adding IP and content. They need it for customers to keep coming to Xbox.

Is 10 years for break even supposed to be a lot?

MS has some obvious synergies with ATVI.

Normally I'm against such huge mergers - but Activision Blizzard is one of the most hostile companies against their users and employees I have ever seen. I can't imagine this being a bad thing for game fans.

MS could decide to prevent resale of next new game to be release on the PS like they did with Starfield. However, they are still significantly better than Sony, so can’t complain too much. This acquisition is probably a good thing for the game developers tho

I wonder if a lot of the hostility was the result of cost cutting to prepare the company for sale?

By all accounts the sale agreement came together rapidly in the light of dark revelations about the state of Blizzard's work culture. I think the company has just been authentically bad without that pressure

How the AVB board did not immediately fire Kotick when it came out that he not only knew about the horrific culture of sexual harassment and hazing in his workplace, but that he withheld it from them, is absolutely baffling to me. Maybe that's what spurred this on.

Looking forward to revisiting this quote in 5 years.

One thing you learn as you get older is that things can always get worse.

Blizzard used to me my absolute favourite game company; its so sad how they have fallen off since they got bought by Activision.

Company culture matters

Well, King makes almost twice as much money as Blizzard iirc, so I would say that they're focusing their resources in the right places.

Making $60 desktop games is just a horrible business to be in, the development costs are too high, and the return is too low. Why would you make a AAA title when you can make Candy Crush? It only makes sense to divert resources where the ROI picture is prettier.

maybe this way of thinking is why japenese developers have been doing so well?

I know that everyone is in for the money, but there's an undeniable difference in how they view the result of their work.

sometimes in western companies it feels like everyone is just sprinting towards a buyout / merger to cash out.

I think I parted ways with them when they went to online account required for a single-player game.

Yes, giving monopolies more power has historically been good for consumers

Ironically, in the age of the internet it has brought things like access to the entire planets information for free, connection with everyone in the world for free, almost free same day shipping, etc. Not saying there aren't trade offs (you have to look at ads) but broadly speaking, it's never been better to be a consumer than right now.

Flashing lights on a screen and noise from a speaker have never been so valuable. Who'd of thunk there were so many people willing to pay good money to waste their time?

You could literally write the same comment, word for word, about the film industry, but for some reason the disdain on HN is reserved only for videogames.

It's not the 80s anymore, so it's really weird to be treating games as an embarrassing hobby for boys, rather than part of the multibillion dollar entertainment industry.

Agreed about the film industry. The writer and actor strikes are making it clear how vile the people running that are. There are wonderful and worthwhile films and games, but not the majority of them. The best way to exploit people is to convince them they want to be exploited. That takes multibillion dollar investments, but it seems to be down to a science now. Edward Bernays was a pioneer.

I forsee a big surge in RTS and other strategic games once they invent something easier to use than a keyboard and mouse :)

[dupe]

More discussion over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37867334

This must be terrible for people that work in gaming. What if you don't work at one studio, and then there are only 3 others you can realistically go to and make enough $ to earn a living? Will that number just continue to decrease over time?

There are like 20 game publishers that are worth over a billion dollars. Gaming is much, much bigger than you think, this is just rearranging the deck chairs.

Note that the unions representing Activision developerd (part of the CWA) supported the merger because Microsoft was more willing to work with the union than Activision and signed a labour neutrality agreement (whereas Activision repeatedly used union-busting tactics)

Elon only wishes

I wish they would finish starcraft ghost

anyone can point me to a decent list of what exactly these objections were?

I hate how Microsoft bribe and bully their way to success, despite all their third rate software.

Funny I thought capitalism was anti-monopolistic.

Wtf is going on with the institutions that are meant to prevent this?

It’s the death of ownership. Everything you consume is now a subscription.

Gamepass will be the new norm.

Bobby Kotick will remain as CEO until the end of 2023 and get a huge check for this purchase.

He's getting rewarded for building a toxic, fratboy workspace, sexually and psycologically harassing women.

I wonder if Microsoft can be held accountable for allowing a sex predator like him to continue working.

He won’t continue working after this year, like you said. Microsoft can’t magically make his equity disappear.

I think the problem is the optics of allowing him to continue working a single day after Microsoft takes over. It sends a message that it's okay.

The problem was allowing him to keep his job and walk away with a bonus check.

This guy should have walked away with nothing instead.

That isn’t how equity works

Well as much as I agree with you I'm sure the legal part of it was looked at with a microscope.

It would have been nice if Microsoft gave him incentive to ride off into the sunset immediately as much as he doesn't deserve it.

ive never heard of optics being used in context like this

It is used in the PR sense

People at that level have complicated employment contracts. Getting rid of them without huge downsides isn't always straightforward.

They said he will keep his job until the end of the year, where he will probably be moved to another job role.

Focusing on one asshole getting undeserved rewards is one thing, but it distracts from the real story.

What hurts way more at scale is the increasing monopolistic power of Microsoft Games. That should be the primary focus of everyone's attention.

This weakens Sony, Nintendo, Steam, Epic. The consumer. Everyone but Microsoft.

Microsoft can give away "experiences" under-cost and sink a lot of human attention into it. That translates to opportunity cost will be spent in the machine rather than distributed economies of innovation.

I don't know how the authorities were convinced that they won't make ActiBlizz games exclusive.

When they acquired Bethesda, a similar concern was brought up. Fast-forward to today, new Bethesda games aren't releasing on Sony consoles. It started with Starfield. TES6 won't release on PS either.

There are a ton of Nintendo and Sony exclusives, so to compete on an equal footing eventually Xbox will need some good exclusives as well. If all their premium AAA titles are released on PlayStation, and PlayStation has a ton of premium titles that don't get released on Xbox, why would anyone bother buying an Xbox? You don't have to have any great love for Microsoft to acknowledge that their departure from the console market would restrict consumer choice and hinder console development.

Well seeing as Microsoft has signed and has offered to sign 10 year deals on not making certain games exclusive, then nobody has to "trust" Microsoft to do anything.

Also, you can just look at all the non exclusive games Microsoft has.

While I'm not excited about this, it's hard to really bring up Sony in this context. They have been horrible about exclusives and only recently started putting anything on PC, not to mention they were the reason cross-play was held off on for so long

Considering how terrible Sony is, almost Nintendo-level, at making sure their titles are exclusives, bringing them up only makes Microsoft look good by comparison: they have by far the fewest exclusives of the three big console makers.

> increasing monopolistic power of Microsoft Games

Microsoft has never been #1 in gaming. It's always been playing catch-up.

There's nothing even remotely close to "monopolistic". That doesn't make any sense at all. You literally can't be a monopoly if you're not #1.

This is Microsoft simply trying to complete better against Sony. Which is a good thing. It benefits the consumer as stronger, more equal competition leads to lower prices for consumers.

Letting Sony remain in the lead forever is what would be bad for consumers in the long term.

Uh no. Buying out previously cross platform studios and then converting their titles to Microsoft only is absolutely not “strengthening competition”.

If Microsoft want to strengthen competition, they would stop burning their first party studios to the ground.

Of course it is strengthening competition.

Playstation has tons of exclusive titles. By one estimate, 4x as many as Xbox [1].

How is that a fair playing field?

I'm personally totally in favor of ending exclusivity entirely for all consoles. (What gamer wouldn't be?) But as long as Sony is playing that game, Microsoft is simply trying to level the playing field here, to make Xbox more competitive against PS.

That's what more competition is.

[1] https://www.tomsguide.com/face-off/ps5-vs-xbox-series-x-excl...

It’s not Sonys fault that Microsoft destroyed their first party dominance while Sony was curating their exclusive titles.

Microsoft endorsed enshittification and got complacent. Sony didn’t.

Microsoft lost their previously winning position through incompetence in a single console generation, and that doesn’t all of a sudden make buying up and making several studios exclusive “fair competition”.

“Fair competition” is not using your other business lines to subsidize harming consumers because you made several years of terrible decisions.

What’s more, Microsoft’s throwing money around to just buy a position in the gaming market is showing through clear review manipulation (Starfalls wall of 10s for what’s clearly a 5-6/10).

For any other company this purchase is viewed as anti-competitive. Microsoft’s arguments were fucking toddler level. How consumer protections managed to bungle this so badly to prevent the sale is likely to go down in law education for “what not to do”. All the lawyers involved in the consumer protection side should be disbarred on the basis of complete incompetence.

How many are actually relevant, though?

I can name a few that are definitely relevant: Uncharted, Horizon, God of War, The Last of Us, titles that are also being released for PC. They are no longer exclusives.

What does competition mean, if not differences in software? The console hardware between Sony and Microsoft isn't meaningfully differentiated. If the consoles had identical catalogs what would be left to differentiate them other than friends list lock-in? A few FPS or a home screen you happen to prefer aren't important things.

So Microsoft failing for a decade to bring titles to their console means that it’s okay to remove titles from Sony gamers?

The consoles today don’t have identical catalogs. That’s where your argument falls apart. One company made a decade of bad decisions which caused them to fall behind.

In a fair market where Microsoft didn’t have trillions in resources to just steal the market, Phil Spencer would be fired and Xbox gaming would be looking for better direction.

Also, Microsoft was granted moving forward on the basis that their claim “the games would be more accessible to everyone” was true. Yet you are here arguing that this will not be the case. Which is it? We all know what Microsoft plans are.

Personally, I am now hoping for Sony and Nintendo to pick up major publishers and make the content exclusive just so I can see the Xbox fanboys lose their shit over how its anti-competitive when they lose games, but not anti-competitive when they rob experiences from others.

What does a company's past failures have to do with whether its current strategy is sound? Do you think Apple shouldn't have been allowed to acquire NeXT when Steve Jobs came back, just because Apple's previous CEO's had done a bad job?

It's not "stealing" anything. It's acquiring a company and paying a fair price for it.

Playstation has way more exclusives than Xbox. This is just getting closer to leveling the playing field. There's nothing wrong with that. The more equal in size major market participants are, the better off it tends to be for consumers.

And please don't call anyone "fanboys". That kind of name-calling isn't appropriate for HN discourse.

People aren't going to see lower prices, no matter who acquires who. Video game prices are effectively set industry wide, similar to music and movies. They effectively set the price collectively, which is why you see articles mention things like:

> Xbox is preparing to join other major games publishers in raising the prices of its major new first-party titles from $60 to $70. https://www.ign.com/articles/microsoft-raising-prices-new-fi...

The Series S console came out at $299.

GamePass is $10.99/mo.

If that's not lowering prices, then I don't know what is.

We're talking about game prices, which are indeed industry set (worked in the industry).

The Xbox Series S has cheaper hardware, that's why it's cheaper. You might as well say video games are getting less expensive because the 3DS isn't $500.

While GamePass is great value, it's just temporary to keep everybody on Microsoft store. You can't mod games, you can't open your game files even, and your progress in live service games will not be transferred to other platforms even if you're on PC still.

It's hard not to acknowledge the fact that Microsoft is getting perfectly positioned to clamp everyone down into their ecosystem harder than ever, and there's nothing we could do about it. They have Github, they have a close partnership with ChatGPT, they have a crazy amount of game studios and IPs.

I don't think the attitude of "let's let them get as big as possible and hope they don't abuse that power" is healthy.

> We're talking about game prices

No we're not, we're talking about the total cost of console gaming, because that's what actually matters when you're discussing the effect on consumers.

> It's hard not to acknowledge the fact that Microsoft is getting perfectly positioned to clamp everyone down into their ecosystem harder than ever

No, it's hard to imagine where you're getting that from at all, if you're talking about their gaming arm. Microsoft isn't positioned to clamp down on anything in gaming. They're simply trying to compete against their more successful competitor Sony.

> I don't think the attitude of "let's let them get as big as possible and hope they don't abuse that power" is healthy.

I don't think the attitude of "let Sony's gaming business be as big as it already is, but don't allow Microsoft's gaming business to try to expand to match Sony's" is healthy. That's literally anti-competitive.

I don't like Sony either so it's a bit weird to find out you're turning this into a "console war" thing. I find that mentality really embarrassing. My beef is with Microsoft essentially owning the planet.

- Microsoft dwarfs Sony as a company, so I don't know why you're painting them as an underdog with their back against the wall.

- The amount of gaming IP Microsoft owns also dwarfs Sony. The concern is not that one or the other will make things exclusive but that the options of who game developers can work for will get smaller, which makes unionization harder, which makes our games shittier.

> No we're not, we're talking about the total cost of console gaming, because that's what actually matters when you're discussing the effect on consumers.

The poster you responded to was talking about gaming prices. That's great if you can save a hundred dollars buying a cheaper console though.

> No, it's hard to imagine where you're getting that from at all.

From all the things I said, and in addition, Microsoft pretty much having it's hand in every pot in the world (Even WHO).

> They're simply trying to compete against their more successful competitor Sony.

> I don't think the attitude of "let Sony's gaming business be as big as it already is

...How big do you think Sony is? You vastly overestimate how worried Microsoft is about Sony. Activision is as big a publisher as Sony and Microsoft just bought them.

Please don't call my point of view embarrassing -- that's uncalled for. You can disagree, but let's not make it personal.

Of course it's a console war thing, it's always been a console war thing. That's literally the definition of the market we're talking about here.

What the rest of Microsoft's business does, or the rest of Sony's business does, outside of gaming, has nothing to do with anything here. Buying Activision isn't helping Microsoft with Office 365, nor is Office going to bring people to Call of Duty. The same as having "The Last of Us" as a PS exclusive isn't helping Sony sell cameras or TV's.

Edit: I mean, if you think Microsoft ought to be forced to spin off its Xbox division as a totally separate company, as part of breaking up the tech giants into 50 different companies, then that's a totally different conversation, and Activision is neither here nor there.

But as long as we're accepting that Microsoft is allowed to compete in gaming in the first place, then purchasing Activision is simply what it needs to be allowed to do in order to compete fairly against Sony.

> Please don't call my point of view embarrassing -- that's uncalled for.

I'm not calling your position embarrassing, I'm calling the position you think I have embarrassing. What's uncalled for is reducing what I'm saying to this

> I don't think the attitude of "let Sony's gaming business be as big as it already is, but don't allow Microsoft's gaming business to try to expand to match Sony's" is healthy. That's literally anti-competitive.

And then getting pissy when I point out that you tried to make it sound like I'm some shill for Sony. I'm literally in other parts of this thread also criticizing Sony. The reality is you're saying untrue, uneducated things about the state of the gaming market. Again Microsoft is already much bigger than Sony's gaming market. Christ, Activison is almost as big as Sony's gaming market.

> What the rest of Microsoft's business does, or the rest of Sony's business does, outside of gaming, has nothing to do with anything here.

Again, Microsoft > Microsoft Gaming > Sony Gaming.

And why would we pretend other parts of Microsofts business don't exist just because Sony isn't also doing it?

Who has their operating system on billions of computers, where they can sell games?

Who has the best capacity to use AI in their businesses? AI is the next step for effective anticheat, which is otherwise a losing battle.

Who is the only feasible steward of the language that lots of games are developed on?

Who owns LinkedIn, where game developers look for jobs?

Who owns the highest selling game ever and has already filled it with microtransactions, essentially printing money?

I don't see how we can ignore any of those things. I look at all of this and it's alarming how fucked we are if Microsoft decides to make all our lives worse, and that's just in gaming. The worst Sony could do has already been done cause Sony are shitheels in their own way.

> Again, Microsoft > Microsoft Gaming > Sony Gaming.

This is where you're wrong.

Microsoft gaming is around $15B in revenue per year. They sold 8.6 million Xboxes in 2022.

Sony gaming is around $30B in revenue per year. They sold 19 million Playstations in 2022.

Sony gaming is literally twice as big. Which is why it's fine for Microsoft to compete. (And see my edit in my previous comment.)

And please stop calling names or implying them. I'm not getting "pissy" and I've certainly never suggested you're a "shill". I'm done replying, because I have no interest in participating in a conversation with language like that.

That's a pretty cherry picked number for all the reasons I stated.

You put words in my mouth and then got bothered when I pointed it out. If you want to argue with yourself be my guest

Sony has behaved in an identical manner for years.

Nintendo refuses to do anything that makes them NOT a hardware company, and so they will continue to languish on last-generation hardware.

Steam is doing just fine. Microsoft sells games on Steam because it made business sense for them to do so.

Epic has good first party titles but they give away two games a week and it has never moved the needle for me because (a) Steam games are the same price, and (b) I've already got most of my games on Steam, so why would I move?

> Nintendo refuses to do anything that makes them NOT a hardware company, and so they will continue to languish on last-generation hardware.

Nintendo does not consider Microsoft and Sony to be competitors. What they absolutely do not want to do is operate like the other guys, who have quite varied interests because the companies are not 100% focused on gaming.

It's hard to argue with Nintendo's staying power. Of course, their methodology is not always consumer friendly.

If your competitors do shitty stuff, it's not an excuse for you to be as shitty as them.

Microsoft could fix this problem, but they decided to enact vengeance against Sony for Call of Duty.

never mind the downvotes, I agree with you. My kid plays minecraft, and the amount of microsoft bullshit we have to put up with to be allowed to play the game we already bought before the acquisition boggles the mind. I have a suspicion, that before 2025, we won't be allowed in the game without an ms authenticator app on my mobile - to be allowed to play a kids game we already paid for. The rights of the end users are very low on the list.

The Minecraft permissions UX is fucking nuts. To be fair, Sony's is ridiculous too. The only one to get it right is Nintendo. Anyways, yeah, I have no doubt you'll eventually need an Xbox login to play Activision/Blizzard games on Playstation, just like Minecraft.

He's being rewarded for growing net income roughly a hundred fold between 2010 and now. I think it's fair that he gets a huge chunk of the value he's created for investors.

He also got a $200mi bonus shortly after he laid off 200 employees: https://frontofficesports.com/activision-blizzard-ceo-bonus-...

And? Laying off 200 employees isn't really that much, Activision-Blizzard employs 17k people after all, and he is creating a lot of value. Boards want to incentivise CEOs to take moonshots -- for institutional investors, a 50% chance to make $100 million is better than a 100% chance to make $30m.

Keeping employees around for the sake of keeping them around is just bad business. A 1% layoff isn't a cost cutting exercise, it's just organisational reshuffling. Employee churn is a fact of life, no need to get too hung up over it. The optics might be not great, but that doesn't really matter.

There is no concept of “fair”. It is just what he and the board ended up negotiating.

In a market economy, what's negotiated between the parties involved is the true value of that item, so in a way, that is what is fair.

What about the value that the actual developers created for investors? Oh, that's right, many of them got fired for their efforts.

Short term gains, long-term destruction of beloved franchises

I’m reading this as he was a regular guy that may have asked some women out a few times given the hyperbole and dissembling around this entire thing.

Bobby is the same dude who left a voicemail threatening to kill an employee.

To put into context, he was a close associate of one Jeffery Epstein, and in his book of clients and close associates. Why? Hard to say, Epstein wasn’t really in the games industry.

That’s really just the beginning of it, Kotick is quite a prolific pos himself: https://nypost.com/2021/11/16/activision-ceo-threatened-to-h.... And he’s alleged to have covered up sexual assault at the company, which given the Epstein connections… tracks.

Everyone famous in the 90s in the eastern US was an associate of Epstein. He was a rich famous guy, it’s sort of expected.

I don't understand how this is supposed to exonerate anyone. Many accounts attest to the fact that Epstein's "interests" were hardly a secret. Donald Trump himself alluded[1] to it.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/10314430-i-ve-known-jeff-ep...

A rich famous guy who was known to be surrounded by underage women at all times, yeah. I'm not exonerating anyone.

> he was a close associate of one Jeffery Epstein

Might want to check your sources

Hmm you're right, I was basing that on the fact that he was in the contact book and the flight logs, but I can't find any official sources corroborating the flight logs. So an acquaintance.

I think hes getting rewarded for growing the company by 95x over the past 20 years.

As a shareholder since 1999 my cost basis for my shares in ATVI is about $1.11 - Exiting at 95.00.

Pretty good return TBH.

I was curious so I looked up the returns on dqdyj, and Aug 1999 to Aug 2023, ATVI’s return was 20.5% per year compared to 7.1% per year for SP500.

They essentially announced that he's fired. A standard transition period would be much longer, if they actually wanted him.

He’s being rewarded for making money. Unfortunately none of what you listed is evaluated by the market.

His tenure post acquisition is governed by the acquisition agreement. Microsoft isn't "allowing" anything.

MS negotiated the agreement. So “allowed” seems like a fair description of the contents of a contract they negotiated and agreed to.

Without knowing all the details, I think it's fair to assume this is a fair approach. I'm sure there are all sorts of legal details to work through that make axing him immediately untenable. 3 months seems like a reasonable timeline.

Gotta love this "at will employment" for people doing work, and the "leaders" get to be an open and known sex pest and still manage to go home with huge checks.

Does Activision not have HR policies? If I sexually harassed my co-workers, you could bet I wouldn't get a golden parachute.

If you had a contract? Yes.

Bobby Kotick spent 30 years building Activision from nothing to a company worth $70 billion. If he doesn't deserve some of that $70 billion then who does?

his victims

His employees that made the actual games?

What an asinine, worthless comment. Yes they get some equity too.

The ones that are still there. Let's not pretend like Blizzard, or the games industry broadly, kept their employees around.

That's typically not how employment works.

Why not just merge all nasdaq 100 and be done with it?

The idea that there's a "fair" market left in the US is an abject joke. At BEST, there are a handful of companies divvying up a market collusively. At worst, and increasingly commonly, we have effective duopolies that juuuust skate the currently en vogue legal definitions to create 2 different walled gardens. Name for me a market (of financial significance) which isn't currently dominated by two mini-monopolies, and I'll show you a private equity firm which is leveraging its ass off to try to capture it, and make it so.

I would say healthcare. With that said, many sub-verticals of the industry are in fact quite dominated by duopolies or triopolies.

healthcare has its own special kind of regulatory capture too

Absolutely. I would go so far as to say healthcare is essentially operated by regulatory capture given how deeply the Medicare market leads where the rest of the market directionally goes.

There are many such markets -- real estate, construction, financial services (banking, mortgages, credit cards, etc), agriculture, retail (no, walmart is not a monopoly), oil, automotive, air travel, I can name many more.

The only big national industries that are dominated by monopolies I would say are telecommunications, utilities, silicon, pharmaceuticals, rail, and even most of these have a few more companies than two. Granted, 3 telecoms is not much of an improvement over 2, but nevertheless your claim is broadly speaking false.

Are there private equity firms trying to consolidate? Sure, but in any of the above they haven't really met with much success.

It's funny that your first example is real estate, when I've read many stories this past year about how private equity is buying up lots of residential homes, and driving the prices even higher than what inflation accounts for. It was a huge story recently that Zillow was trying to buy (and flip) homes, based on their pricing algorithm. Thankfully, they failed miserably.

MS has been making some really mediocre games in the past 5 years. What have they made that was good or won awards/Acclaim? I think they buy studios and the execs then put their finger prints all over it and f up the games. Just look at Starfield, hyped af but mid af

true, I wonder what will happen co COD

Age of Empires 4 is the best yet, so is flight simulator.

I was absolutely bored by age 4. I really like age 2hd however.

where is hellbender. hover 95. ski free?

I really don't get the complaints about Starfield being mid. What did people expect? Skyrim, Fallout 3/4, Starfield are all basically the same things with visual retouches along the way. This is not a slam in the slightest mind you: I'm currently in the midst of my fourth playthrough of Fallout 4. I'm looking forward to picking up Starfield in a year or so once the modders have made it more awesome and Bethesda's fixed the more egregious issues. But apart from that, it's the Bethesda formula: big ass world, a lot of stuff to do in it, none of it particularly mindblowing but all of it generally sitting atop a standard of quality you expect. You go to the places, you shoot the bandits, you collect shit, you sell most of the shit and then get a new point on the map to check out. This is The Loop.

Like I just don't understand what people expected. It's Fallout/Skyrim in space. It has a ton of the exact same mechanics, the exact same weak points, the exact same strong points. I'm sure I'll enjoy it, I'm just not chomping at the bit to have it right now and so will pick up the Game of the Year edition with all DLCs included for like $20 in a year or two.

If you like Bethesda games, you'll probably like Starfield. If you don't, you won't. I personally enjoy them, they're excellent "brain off" entertainment for me and at the same time I understand why some people don't like that, and that's also completely fine but I just don't get why people are flipping their lids in either direction. By all accounts (bearing in mind I haven't played it) it is exactly, 100% to the letter what I expected it to be.

It's not, though. I don't think Starfield is bad -- it's well-produced and rich with many widely beloved game elements from earlier Bethesda project -- but it focused on the ElderScrolls/Fallout bits that I didn't care so much about and pushed aside the parts that absorbed me into those games.

Specifically, the other franchises let you literally just wander around through a hand-crafted world stumbling into who knows what. There are very few games that can deliver that because the hand-crafted thing is sooo labor intensive and expensive.

But Starfield failed to deliver on that. There are countless quests and destinations and rich dialog trees, but if I just push forward on my control stick, I will immediately leave "hand-crafted" behind in favor of "procedurally generated" and then I will hit a wall in at most 30-40 minutes. That's so tremendously different than what I was able to do in the other games that I just didn't have a reason to play anymore.

Bethesda wasn't obliged to deliver on the bits I personally loved about the other games, but I (and some others) were legitimately bummed when they didn't.

> I'm sure I'll enjoy it, I'm just not chomping at the bit to have it right now and so will pick up the Game of the Year edition with all DLCs included for like $20 in a year or two.

So...you haven't even played it and you're incredulously wondering why people don't like it? I don't have a big stake in what others think about the game but that seems worth reconsidering.

I think if you like Fallout 4 you MAY like Starfield. I guess just speaking as someone that ignored all the marketing for this game and came in with an open mind, I wasn't expecting anything. I love a lot of Bethesda games, though I wasn't crazy on Fallout 4 since it stripped some RPG stuff. It was serviceable still. I didn't really care when people said "oh you can't land on planets" and things like that. It seemed like a lot of the complaints people about Starfield were unimportant to me.

So imagine how disappointed I was when it had a bunch of additional things I didn't like on top of that.

- Terrible NPCs. Not likable or hatable, just bland. All the companions talk the exact same.

- Boring missions and story (yes even the "cyberpunk" city was bad).

- Easily the worst skill tree I have ever seen in a Bethesda RPG. I have never been less excited to level up. It's just minor stat boosts or shit that should've been basekit for the player. Fallout 4 had a great skill tree that made me feel different on each playthrough.

- While we're talking RPGs, this is not an RPG. There's basically no decisions to be made in any of the missions and no sense of having a character.

- Pretty boring setting. I know it's Nasa punk, but I vastly prefer the Fallout setting.

- Maybe one of the laziest ways procedural generation has ever been used in modern gaming. I hope it's the nail in the coffin for this kind of development.

- To cap it off, the discourse around the game has been annoying because it's either people calling the game woke or people saying only idiots that like No Man's Sky are disappointed by this game. It's a lot of polarized hateful nonsense.

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