One can be frustrated by yet another monopoly coalescing before our eyes while also being happy for Activision/Blizzard workers who are looking towards a less toxic workplace.
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Microsoft have bought Activision Blizzard
- Thread starter Phantoon
- Start date
I worded what I said very carefully, and nothing I wrote is in conflict with what you said.
muteKi
Geno Cidecity
I wish I shared this optimism!!
Maybe the working conditions of a few thousand people will improve, maybe not. I'm not particularly hopeful that a soulless multinational conglomerate will be all that responsive and not place other priorities ahead of that. Meanwhile, a 2.5 trillion dollar company whose entire business model can be summarized as "monopolistic predator" just bought the largest publisher in video games. All it cost them was less than 3% of their market cap.
Gaming is a bigger industry that makes more money than Hollywood. Forget comparative equivocation, this is bigger than Disney buying Fox. If there was even a shred of integrity left at the FCC, they'd immediately laugh them out of the room and put the kibosh on this.
Gaming is a bigger industry that makes more money than Hollywood. Forget comparative equivocation, this is bigger than Disney buying Fox. If there was even a shred of integrity left at the FCC, they'd immediately laugh them out of the room and put the kibosh on this.
Then I did one anyway.I would make some Animal Crossing images in regards to this latest shit show, but...
There's no topping this.
More in the spoilerpop.
I agree. How long is it till Sony / Amazon / Netflix / Google make a counter move?
I don't care about Blizzard games becoming MS exclusive. I will care if Capcom, From Software, Konami, SEGA or Square Enix are purchased and become platform exclusive.
If this trend gets spun out to its logical conclusion every video game franchise with a sizable fan base becomes platform exclusive. It seems very bad for the consumer.
***
I've thought about this some more. I think we as gamers have had it pretty good in terms of relatively few platform exclusives; big games (excluding Nintendo games...which are big) generally come to PC, XBOX and PS. When you look at film and tv and see the battle for exclusive content that Netflix, Disney +, HBO Max are waging, its hard not to see video games following a similar path.
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Not weighing in on whether this is a good or bad thing, just wanted to point out that this was the case for most games from 1985 through ca. 2006.
ArugulaZ
Fearful asymmetry
What's interesting is that Microsoft is following in the path of M Network and Atarisoft before them and going console agnostic. (Arguably, they've been this way since the Game Boy Advance, with titles like SabreWulf.) I mean, you might as well cover as much ground as you can, even if it breaks some unwritten law of exclusive support for the system you manufacture. Also, it's not like they're going to be able to port Candy Crush to Windows Phone or somethin'.
Ludendorkk
(he/him)
Given that the merger was probably only possible because of the sexual harassment crisis, Microsoft's earlier condemnation might be seen as particularly craven
My understanding is that they legally can't make such bold proclamations about what they're changing or who they're dumping until after it's a done deal. IANAL, though, but isn't that how it usually goes?
Anyway, while I don't love seeing everyone get bought up, it's more of a case-by-case basis for me. For instance, my understanding is that MS buying them helped Double Fine tremendously with doing Psychonauts 2. IIRC, there were going to be far fewer, if any, bosses in it prior to acquisition, and they got more time needed to make it good. And make it good they did.
Activision, put simply, is one of the exceptions. I feel like they're wasting too many great franchises and talented individuals while wallowing in their own muck, and I hope that new management will set some things right.
Incidentally, comparing it to Disney and Fox seems a bit off to me. Wouldn't that be more like if they bought PlayStation or Nintendo (which yes, they did try to do, and got laughed out of the room)?
Strategically, even if Bobby Kotick's misconduct weren't a giant liability, there's rarely a point in keeping around the CEO of an acquired company. It's a redundancy. I find the anonymous reports entirely credible that the writing is on the wall for his continued employment, but in order to complete an acquisition at all, let alone one that's nearly 69 billion nice American dollars, it's necessary to not ruffle the shareholders too much with talk of purges, so it'll play out in stages. It is galling to consider that such an asshole is still going to get his golden parachute, but that particular deal was sealed long ago.
We live in the era of media conglomerates. What can be said about the bloating of the Xbox division, their ambition to encompass as much of the field as they possibly can, that wasn't already said about the likes of Disney? Industry has outpaced the regulations, and the country in which Microsoft is headquartered is an empire in its twilight, alternately catatonic and neurotic, incapable of even attempting to address any but the most urgent of crises. The end of copyright as we know it is the only thing that can put an end to this.
But there's a more immediate drama to all of this, and that's what I find interesting.
Microsoft's strategy in games is the same as its strategy everywhere else: create a platform, strengthen the platform, broaden the platform, invite users to do whatever they please on your platform, and collect subscription fees. Like in every other sector, they think long-term, which I confess is a tendency that makes me view them a fair bit less negatively than any of the other tech giants. In marketing, they wish to present their platform as the superior destination for, and synonymous with, (western triple-A) gaming. Highly capable and accessible consoles is one prong of that strategy.
On another prong, their tactics have shifted over the years. At first they simply were the lavish sponsor of exclusive games from respected developers. The most discriminating enthusiasts, the theory went, would lead the rest of the market into Xbox's waiting arms. This produced some gems of games, of course, but it was untenable as a strategy, for two reasons. The first reason was because each exclusivity deal had to be negotiated individually and could be thwarted by any random publisher with their own random plans for their annual product calendar. They weren't building close ties; they had no loyal partners, only mercenaries.
The second reason why the strategy of buying exclusives failed was because individual games aren't what build up the reputation of a brand and the loyalty of customers. Rather, intellectual property rules everything. Even Nintendo, a century-old toy company, reached the conclusion that their games are merely their best means of bolstering and monetizing their valuable trademarks and characters.
This is why they gradually shifted to a strategy of outright buying developers and publishers instead. Loyal partnership was now no longer necessary; as tentacles of the octopus, they would as a matter of course release on Microsoft's preferred platform: always Xbox, often Windows, sometimes elsewhere depending on the needs of the season. Buying whole catalogs at once helps diversify their intellectual property holdings more efficiently, and being aboard the mothership lends the stability that's helpful to allow new IPs to grow into established ones.
Subscriptions are what every tech company loves these days. Money that you keep getting without having to make a whole additional sale every single time is money that you can plan around, money that you can rely on, and therefore more valuable even than other kinds of money, even if you end up with less of it. If you go to the Xbox website, they don't even list the MSRP for the Series X, instead offering a monthly financing plan. In the early 2000s Xbox Live proved their customers would pay a subscription fee that wasn't tied to any one game, and nowadays Xbox Games Pass is following the lead of Netflix and pushing that discovery even further.
To improve the value proposition of Games Pass, they need more games to put on it, and by now they know that it's more effective for them to do this by owning the developers than by striking deals with other publishers (though they certainly still do plenty of that). The Bethesda and Activision acquisitions, together with the Mojang purchase in 2014, mean that most of the biggest games on Xbox are now owned by Microsoft.
Microsoft games will now be nearly as hegemonic on Microsoft platforms as Nintendo games are on Nintendo platforms.
In this arrangement, there's no need to choke out the competition; their best customers are the ones who also own a Switch and a Playstation. The browser wars of the 90s revealed to the world that restricting choice is a crude and unnecessary tactic; more intensively developing the market you have is a much more powerful move. Google and Apple learned it, why not Microsoft? It also makes it harder to be prosecuted under century-old antitrust laws. Vertical integration is the name of the game here. It's an enormous potential savings to run all these online games on Azure, for instance.
Microsoft isn't yet a giant media conglomerate on the level of Disney, but they clearly aspire to become one. Media conglomerates are based on intellectual property, on the government-granted monopolies on cultural icons. The nature of the risk they pose to society is cultural, not economic. It takes a long time for that risk to materialize, and it's going to take years for Microsoft to start exploiting the motherlode they just hit.
If every current employee affected by this merger instead resigned (and I don't think they would choose to - working at Microsoft is a better gig than the average game company offers to anyone outside of the C-suite, and they've gotten experienced at smooth integration), they would still have two enormous assets: the right to continue operating some of the most continuously profitable service games on earth, including World of Warcraft and Candy Crush Saga; and all the dormant trademarks of the former most prolific and acquisitive game publisher in the world. I mean, for crying out loud, they own Zork now. They've got a deep stable of classics, poised to jumpstart the development of the richest catalog of game IP in America. Bobby Kotick let that field lie fallow in favor of making as many Call of Duty spinoffs as money could buy, but I don't think Phil Spencer is gonna repeat that mistake.
I think this whole thing is fascinating, and only anti-consumer to the extent that it's consistent with patterns endemic to the broader collapse of civilization, so I'm simply very interested to see how this story unfolds.
We live in the era of media conglomerates. What can be said about the bloating of the Xbox division, their ambition to encompass as much of the field as they possibly can, that wasn't already said about the likes of Disney? Industry has outpaced the regulations, and the country in which Microsoft is headquartered is an empire in its twilight, alternately catatonic and neurotic, incapable of even attempting to address any but the most urgent of crises. The end of copyright as we know it is the only thing that can put an end to this.
But there's a more immediate drama to all of this, and that's what I find interesting.
Microsoft's strategy in games is the same as its strategy everywhere else: create a platform, strengthen the platform, broaden the platform, invite users to do whatever they please on your platform, and collect subscription fees. Like in every other sector, they think long-term, which I confess is a tendency that makes me view them a fair bit less negatively than any of the other tech giants. In marketing, they wish to present their platform as the superior destination for, and synonymous with, (western triple-A) gaming. Highly capable and accessible consoles is one prong of that strategy.
On another prong, their tactics have shifted over the years. At first they simply were the lavish sponsor of exclusive games from respected developers. The most discriminating enthusiasts, the theory went, would lead the rest of the market into Xbox's waiting arms. This produced some gems of games, of course, but it was untenable as a strategy, for two reasons. The first reason was because each exclusivity deal had to be negotiated individually and could be thwarted by any random publisher with their own random plans for their annual product calendar. They weren't building close ties; they had no loyal partners, only mercenaries.
The second reason why the strategy of buying exclusives failed was because individual games aren't what build up the reputation of a brand and the loyalty of customers. Rather, intellectual property rules everything. Even Nintendo, a century-old toy company, reached the conclusion that their games are merely their best means of bolstering and monetizing their valuable trademarks and characters.
This is why they gradually shifted to a strategy of outright buying developers and publishers instead. Loyal partnership was now no longer necessary; as tentacles of the octopus, they would as a matter of course release on Microsoft's preferred platform: always Xbox, often Windows, sometimes elsewhere depending on the needs of the season. Buying whole catalogs at once helps diversify their intellectual property holdings more efficiently, and being aboard the mothership lends the stability that's helpful to allow new IPs to grow into established ones.
Subscriptions are what every tech company loves these days. Money that you keep getting without having to make a whole additional sale every single time is money that you can plan around, money that you can rely on, and therefore more valuable even than other kinds of money, even if you end up with less of it. If you go to the Xbox website, they don't even list the MSRP for the Series X, instead offering a monthly financing plan. In the early 2000s Xbox Live proved their customers would pay a subscription fee that wasn't tied to any one game, and nowadays Xbox Games Pass is following the lead of Netflix and pushing that discovery even further.
To improve the value proposition of Games Pass, they need more games to put on it, and by now they know that it's more effective for them to do this by owning the developers than by striking deals with other publishers (though they certainly still do plenty of that). The Bethesda and Activision acquisitions, together with the Mojang purchase in 2014, mean that most of the biggest games on Xbox are now owned by Microsoft.
Microsoft games will now be nearly as hegemonic on Microsoft platforms as Nintendo games are on Nintendo platforms.
In this arrangement, there's no need to choke out the competition; their best customers are the ones who also own a Switch and a Playstation. The browser wars of the 90s revealed to the world that restricting choice is a crude and unnecessary tactic; more intensively developing the market you have is a much more powerful move. Google and Apple learned it, why not Microsoft? It also makes it harder to be prosecuted under century-old antitrust laws. Vertical integration is the name of the game here. It's an enormous potential savings to run all these online games on Azure, for instance.
Microsoft isn't yet a giant media conglomerate on the level of Disney, but they clearly aspire to become one. Media conglomerates are based on intellectual property, on the government-granted monopolies on cultural icons. The nature of the risk they pose to society is cultural, not economic. It takes a long time for that risk to materialize, and it's going to take years for Microsoft to start exploiting the motherlode they just hit.
If every current employee affected by this merger instead resigned (and I don't think they would choose to - working at Microsoft is a better gig than the average game company offers to anyone outside of the C-suite, and they've gotten experienced at smooth integration), they would still have two enormous assets: the right to continue operating some of the most continuously profitable service games on earth, including World of Warcraft and Candy Crush Saga; and all the dormant trademarks of the former most prolific and acquisitive game publisher in the world. I mean, for crying out loud, they own Zork now. They've got a deep stable of classics, poised to jumpstart the development of the richest catalog of game IP in America. Bobby Kotick let that field lie fallow in favor of making as many Call of Duty spinoffs as money could buy, but I don't think Phil Spencer is gonna repeat that mistake.
I think this whole thing is fascinating, and only anti-consumer to the extent that it's consistent with patterns endemic to the broader collapse of civilization, so I'm simply very interested to see how this story unfolds.
Phantoon
I cuss you bad
Great post, Bongo. Things are going to get very interesting.
If I were Sony I'd be slightly worried though - they've always relied more on third parties than their own IPs. They overthrew Nintendo with this way of working. However, if the third parties start to be better on Xbox or disappear entirely, their model starts to look shaky.
If I were Sony I'd be slightly worried though - they've always relied more on third parties than their own IPs. They overthrew Nintendo with this way of working. However, if the third parties start to be better on Xbox or disappear entirely, their model starts to look shaky.
“Society is collapsing, isn’t that interesting?”
Breh
Breh
Becksworth
Aging Hipster Dragon Dad
Okay, it's been 24 hours and I'm struggling to establish any strong opinion on this merger.
I mean yeah on paper a gaming hardware maker buying the biggest and oldest 3rd party game publisher sounds monopolistic. That rings hollow though when I remember we are currently in an environment with four major manufacturers of dedicated gaming hardware who each have a healthy niche in the market, with a probable 5th one in soon to hit (and to say nothing of the boom of indie gaming hardware, mobile, PCs, and big tech still trying to make cloud gaming a thing). The gaming market is arguably never been this fractured, so calls of a monopoly wouldn't really go anywhere no matter how loud we shout about it.
I can also sympathize with PlayStation owners having restricted access to games, but at the same time Activision already acted like the console business was a functional duopoly to begin with with only occasionally throwing a bone towards Nintendo owners way (and honestly with Microsoft there is a strong chance Nintendo owners are still getting those scraps). If losing CoD and Overwatch sequels hurts Sony in any significant way in the future then I'm going to have to bring up what was it thinking mishandling it's indie relations, letting many of its smaller western studios slip off and become independent, and outright scuttling most of its Japan studios. Sony putting all its eggs in the AAA basket was just begging Microsoft to try stunts like this to undermine their main competitor.
Then there is the whole Activision is toxic angle, but honestly I can't think of any realistic solution to that isn't going to have unsavory aspects. Kotick and friends weren't suddenly going to have an epiphany on how truly awful they are and make genuine meaningful amends on their own accord, but they are also too entrenched in Activision to easily get rid of. I wouldn't really be any happier if it was EA who bought them out. At least a despotic monarch didn't buy them (NO I WILL NOT SHUT UP ABOUT SNK!).
I mean yeah on paper a gaming hardware maker buying the biggest and oldest 3rd party game publisher sounds monopolistic. That rings hollow though when I remember we are currently in an environment with four major manufacturers of dedicated gaming hardware who each have a healthy niche in the market, with a probable 5th one in soon to hit (and to say nothing of the boom of indie gaming hardware, mobile, PCs, and big tech still trying to make cloud gaming a thing). The gaming market is arguably never been this fractured, so calls of a monopoly wouldn't really go anywhere no matter how loud we shout about it.
I can also sympathize with PlayStation owners having restricted access to games, but at the same time Activision already acted like the console business was a functional duopoly to begin with with only occasionally throwing a bone towards Nintendo owners way (and honestly with Microsoft there is a strong chance Nintendo owners are still getting those scraps). If losing CoD and Overwatch sequels hurts Sony in any significant way in the future then I'm going to have to bring up what was it thinking mishandling it's indie relations, letting many of its smaller western studios slip off and become independent, and outright scuttling most of its Japan studios. Sony putting all its eggs in the AAA basket was just begging Microsoft to try stunts like this to undermine their main competitor.
Then there is the whole Activision is toxic angle, but honestly I can't think of any realistic solution to that isn't going to have unsavory aspects. Kotick and friends weren't suddenly going to have an epiphany on how truly awful they are and make genuine meaningful amends on their own accord, but they are also too entrenched in Activision to easily get rid of. I wouldn't really be any happier if it was EA who bought them out. At least a despotic monarch didn't buy them (NO I WILL NOT SHUT UP ABOUT SNK!).
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ArugulaZ
Fearful asymmetry
Kotick Wanted To Buy Kotaku Or PC Gamer To Change Public Narrative - Report
An Activision spokesperson has disputed the claim.
www.gamespot.com
This is just repulsive. "We're not getting good press! Quick, BUY the press!" Activision denies this, but come on, would you really put it past them?
At the start of the four years from Hell, I remember how supportive the tabloid trash rags were of the Orange Demon (mainly the National Enquirer). Which is an anomaly, 'cuz under regular circumstances those things are never positive in regards to the President.Kotick Wanted To Buy Kotaku Or PC Gamer To Change Public Narrative - Report
An Activision spokesperson has disputed the claim.
This is just repulsive. "We're not getting good press! Quick, BUY the press!" Activision denies this, but come on, would you really put it past them?
I could definitely see a company as lucrative as Activision Blizzard actually buying what press they could to have their own dedicated outlets for sucking up to them.
fanboymaster
(He/Him)
I wonder how strong the urge would have been to rename them "Koticku."Kotick Wanted To Buy Kotaku Or PC Gamer To Change Public Narrative - Report
An Activision spokesperson has disputed the claim.
This is just repulsive. "We're not getting good press! Quick, BUY the press!" Activision denies this, but come on, would you really put it past them?
It was never going to happen any other way. I say fine, give him his final drop in the bucket compared to all the wealth he's already amassed.
The important thing is that he'll be gone not only from the company, but hopefully the whole damn industry and goes into retirement.
ArugulaZ
Fearful asymmetry
Yeah, the National Enquirer really kissed his ass, because people on staff were good friends with him. What really tore my heart out is that one of those people was Jeff Rovin, the guy who wrote those pretty good How to Win at Nintendo books in the 1980s. Video game journalism was at a low point in the late 1980s and early 1990s, full of typos and condescension and dubious enthusiasm. His books largely avoided all that, even if there was a pinch of snide disregard for the hobby within their pages.
The Globe seemed to offer a counterpoint from what I saw on supermarket checkout stands, digging into 45 with a fork and knife... but now it's lashing out at Biden the way it did his predecessor. So I don't know. They don't call 'em trash tabloids for nothing.
While you bring up a valid point, the recent history of games had a lot of platform exclusives, its not the same.
Sure I could not play Super Castlevania IV on my Genesis, but I could play Bloodlines. The major developers made games on competing platforms.
When MS or Sony or Amazon own the studio does anyone really think they are going to make their studios games available on other platforms? I guess its tbd, it will be interesting to see if the next big Bethesda or Blizzard title comes to Sony. I have my doubts.
Jeanie
(Fem or Gender Neutral)
Starfield has already been confirmed to be an X-Box / PC exclusive, but I think TES6 is still coming to PS5
Yep. I think they will do a game-by-game analysis because they'd certainly like to maximize their profit. I certainly don't see CoD, with their bajillion microtransactions, being kept Xbox only.
ArugulaZ
Fearful asymmetry
Factor 5 wanted to make a Genesis port of Castlevania IV, but Konami decided they wanted to take a crack at developing a Genesis Castlevania game themselves.
Factor 5 Almost Ported Super Castlevania IV To The Sega Mega Drive
"We did a 1:1 port of Indiana Jones to the Genesis"
www.nintendolife.com
Ah, what could have been!
I'm not disagreeing, but Konami (nor Capcom, nor Midway, etc, etc) did NOT develop for the Genesis for years, with there being a three-year gap between SCV4 and Bloodlines.