Microsoft Games - Will buy Activision Blizzard

It will bear delicious fruit if this purchase does lead to some stellar classic games finding their respective ways to great old games or steam. In that case I'd say the consumer might actually win out.
 
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Call of Duty not coming to Playstation in future is big news in the console space. What will happen to the Battle.net launcher? Maybe it will be kept for now given the deal has to pass regulatory hurdles, it is forecast that the merger will take until 2023. Blizzard games coming to Steam and gamepass is cool.

I just realised that Microsoft now owns lots of Sierra titles like Space Quest and Kings Quest. Not to mention Zork games.
 
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What will happen to the Battle.net launcher?

I'm assuming they'll just keep it the way it is for now. If those games end up coming to Steam and other platforms though, I think we'll see the user-base for B.net dwindle pretty fast. It'll be interesting to see if Microsoft offers us a way to transition to another platform and keep our purchased games.
 
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I'm assuming they'll just keep it the way it is for now. If those games end up coming to Steam and other platforms though, I think we'll see the user-base for B.net dwindle pretty fast. It'll be interesting to see if Microsoft offers us a way to transition to another platform and keep our purchased games.

I'm sure they'll be keen to keep all existing Blizzard customers on side. Likely they will offer an account migration service. Hopefully we get to choose to migrate to our Steam accounts rather than Microsoft one as that would be worthless to me otherwise.
 
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It is funny actually to me, because MMO players always make those comments about what if I could buy my favourite MMO and rework it to my liking. And then suddenly Phil Spencer will come and say - hold my beer. So I think atleast WoW players could be happy - I mean it cannot get worse for them, can it?

But I agree that the culture will be the same if management is bad already. Or worse if someone bad will sense the opportunity to climb the ranks among new inexperienced managers.
 
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Microsoft is desperate for new GamePass content. Considering the $70B price tag, I believe they will milk Activision-Blizzard dry. While everyone is focused on the big IPs such as Call of Duty, Diablo, and WoW, consider the many dormant IPs from studios/publishers gobbled up by Activision over the years:

Betrayal at Krondor, Outpost, King's/Police/Space Quest, the Red Baron/Aces series, Hexen/Heretic, Interstate '76, No One Lives Forever, and Return to Zork, just to name a few.

I predict (hope) some of these will see remasters or remakes. Just imagine Hexen remade using Doom Eternal's id Tech 7 or I'76 with the Forza Horizon 5 engine! But, I'd settle for a simple remaster of Betrayal at Krondor; a great game whose graphics did not age well.
 
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Well this solves the big rumor going around for a year about about who Microsoft planned to buyout next. I doubt Battle.net will be removed from all past games though.
 
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Ominously, Microsoft-Obsidian-Activision-Bethesda/Blizzard is MOAB^2. Will it be the "Mother of all Bombs"?
 
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Ominously, Microsoft-Obsidian-Activision-Bethesda/Blizzard is MOAB^2. Will it be the "Mother of all Bombs"?

As you said yourself, MOAB^2 meaning MOAB squared :p
 
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Call of Duty not coming to Playstation in future is big news in the console space. What will happen to the Battle.net launcher? Maybe it will be kept for now given the deal has to pass regulatory hurdles, it is forecast that the merger will take until 2023. Blizzard games coming to Steam and gamepass is cool.

I just realised that Microsoft now owns lots of Sierra titles like Space Quest and Kings Quest. Not to mention Zork games.

Exactly

Call of Duty is probably one of the most popular games on the PlayStation console, now Microsoft has the rights. Not to mention other franchises like Diablo, Destiny, Crash Bandicoot, and Spyro the Dragon. On top of them buying Bethesda prior.

These changes will mostly be neutral/positive for PC gamers. But in the console world this is a massive announcement.

Microsoft owning Sierra gives me faint hope for remasters or sequels!! And and Warcraft IV please?!
 
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Likely they will offer an account migration service.


I don't think that there will be an account migration with all its pitfalls. The much easier way for Activision Blizzard and MS is to just integrate the B.net client with Steam in the same way that the uPlay client, Origin client and Rockstar launcher are already integrated, i.e. you will probably need a B.net account and Steam will include a thin client for launching the games.

I expect them to keep the Battle.net client. Actiblizz revealed today that they have 400 million active users per month. The last known number for Steam for comparison is 120 million active users per month in 2020.
Now, I don't think that the 400 million are B.net only in the case of Activision. They probably include mobile users, too, but that is still a lot of users so I'm quite sure they will simply keep B.net as is.


The PC, by the way, is only the third largest source of revenue for Actiblizz. As of 2020, they make most of their revenue from consoles ($2.784bn), then mobile ($2.559bn), then PC ($2.056bn). The year before, mobile even took the lead for the first time.
They are huge on consoles and mobile. Well, or "were"… the Playstation revenue will drop to "0" once the acquisition has been completed :biggrin: . But, yeah, thanks to the exclusives they will probably make up for it and then some…
 
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I just realised that Microsoft now owns lots of Sierra titles like Space Quest and Kings Quest. Not to mention Zork games.
Master Chief finally removes his helmet, revealing that he is, in fact, part of the Flathead family and heir to the Great Underground Empire!
 
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Not sure how much of a guarantee this is to be an improvement in culture at Acti-Blizz. If the rot is mostly with senior management, they need to be let go for this to improve. If management remains mostly the same it'll just be mostly the same thing, just under a new financial umbrella.



I was part of company purchase in one of my previous jobs, and while the culture wasn't bad, it remained pretty much the same as it was before the purchase. We were almost like a company within a company, until most of the people left and were replaced by new people. So if the rot is still there, it'll stay there. It has to be removed intentionally. But then it gets complicated to prove who's ok and who's not. My feeling is the company culture will be mostly the same, maybe with some effort put in at the start and then abandoned.
This is likely true. It's just that I've heard that from people more in the know that the company culture in Microsoft is supposed to be pretty decent.

Hopefully Bobby Kotick and his friends leave in a while, and hopefully better people come in to slowly change the culture.
 
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Bobby Kotick will be laughing all the way to the bank. He will make a fortune off his stock and the severance pay from Microsoft. So I doubt he really cares about losing his job.
 
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Bobby Kotick will be laughing all the way to the bank. He will make a fortune off his stock and the severance pay from Microsoft. So I doubt he really cares about losing his job.
If he laughs all the way to the bank and the company gets better as well, that's win-win :D
 
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I don't think this is such good news. Whenever already gigantic corporations swallow another gigantic corp, it makes me wary.

Microsoft already controls the PC operating system market, so now the more big game franchises they own, the more they can sell their next Windows version to, by force. Oh, you want the newest Call of Duty, looks shiny? Well, it will require Windows 13, like it or not, and if you hate our newest, more intrusive Windows version, too bad!

That said, for me, Call of Duty is the only game series Activision/Blizzard had that I have several of them in my library.

Still, I would rather have more competition in the pc games category than less. At what point does Microsoft control too much?

Anyway…
 
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I don't think this is such good news. Whenever already gigantic corporations swallow another gigantic corp, it makes me wary.

Microsoft already controls the PC operating system market, so now the more big game franchises they own, the more they can sell their next Windows version to, by force. Oh, you want the newest Call of Duty, looks shiny? Well, it will require Windows 13, like it or not, and if you hate our newest, more intrusive Windows version, too bad!

That said, for me, Call of Duty is the only game series Activision/Blizzard had that I have several of them in my library.

Still, I would rather have more competition in the pc games category than less. At what point does Microsoft control too much?

Anyway…

Yeah, sadly the concentration is inevitable. That's the end goal of capitalism. You can't have a competition between different groups without a few emerging as winners. That's the fallacy of believing you can regulate this. Only something stronger than these companies can regulate this. And the state could be that, if it weren't already co-opted by the same private interests. Just as most industries, we'll end up with a 2-3 really strong ones that will likely engage in cartel agreements, splitting up the market and not competing with each other.
 
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The best thing coming out of this is probably that we will have a few launchers less.
The worst thing might be that we will be forced to use a subscription service in the future. Which in itself is not abysmal, but I fear for modding opportunities.
 
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The best thing coming out of this is probably that we will have a few launchers less.
The worst thing might be that we will be forced to use a subscription service in the future. Which in itself is not abysmal, but I fear for modding opportunities.

Most modern offerings from these companies are multi-player focused which doesn't interest me. Subscription is a complete no no for me. I worry about the paucity of single player games and even those few are getting predatory practices introduced. It might be just classic and indie + occasional AA games in my future.
 
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