Consolidation is concerning, but this also means there’s a good chance Booby Cocktit will be booted out.
…Booted out with a golden parachute, but a boot nonetheless.
A golden parachute so big he could trivially buy into the next company. If he wanted to retire, he would have long done it.
Worse, what if he ends up as the boss fo GamePass or Xbox?
What’s most disappointing about this aside from the negative impacts it has on consumers with no benefits is how it shows what a grip Microsoft has on uk entities. This has been a problem for decades. Microsoft is one of those companies that has its tendrils all throughout the uk, and they can get whatever they want. Even when what they want is in opposition to decisions made by authorities specifically designed to block this kind of thing.
It sounds like the issue the regulator had was something specific to cloud game streaming, and Microsoft addressed that.
The CMA had originally blocked the acquisition over cloud gaming concerns, but Microsoft recently restructured the deal to transfer cloud gaming rights for current and new Activision Blizzard games to Ubisoft.
yes that’s mechanism where you see microsoft get what they want. they do a platitude that doesn’t affect them, that they generally won’t even bother to enforce. because the regulatory body can’t just say “they made us do this by talking to someone higher up that said we had to do this”
the CMA never goes back on decisions like this, their decision is final and you can only fight it by going to the courts and the courts will only rule on if it was legal for the CMA to make the decision, not on the validity of the decision.
yet microsoft gets an unheard-of do-over.
Consolidation is bad for consumers, this would never have gone thru pre-reagan admin
Counterpoint: Consolidation in such a fast paced industry with a low barrier to entry isn’t as bad as physical goods consolidation. If Microsoft acts in bad faith, people just won’t buy games from that studio anymore, developers will just leave the company and start a new studio, free lance, or work for another party. It’s not like ABK was lighting the market on fire either. Microsoft is buying a trash heap and hoping to turn the internal culture around to bring back neglected IPs
Counter-counterpoint: When Activision bought and consolidated Blizzard an Blizzard North, they made it worse and people still slave away for them, and enough people buy their objectively inferior products to keep them going on life support to be sold again.
They became a poster child of what’s wrong with the industry (Diablo Immortal) and nobody learned anything. Baulder’s Gate 3 did more to further a healthy ecosystem than any merger has.
Yes. Independent developers have regularly released smash hits like Stardew Valley.
Let’s hope they can chew what they’ve attempted to eat. They can barely manage their first party studios, and now they’re going to attempt to manage one of the biggest publisher/studio.
Manage? They just want the money from King and to prevent games from releasing on PlayStation.
I mean yeah, that’s how acquisitions and exclusivity works. It’s not like PlayStation bought Bungie to lose money or make exclusivity deals with third parties to bring games to Xbox. That’s just how this industry works.
By manage I mean, they’re gonna handle so many companies without a good track record of being able to do it. To make the money from King they will need to be able to retain talent and steward its properties properly.
they’re gonna handle so many companies without a good track record of being able to do it. To make the money from King they will need to be able to retain talent and steward its properties properly.
No they don’t. As we’ve already seen, MS doesn’t have to do anything in regards to development. Promotion, marketing will get a boost but they can be hands off most of the technical details and still make bank. Bethesda, King and Activision are all quite profitable on their own. Now they simply can’t develop for Sony and they get distributed on Game Pass day 1.
Also, exclusionary buy-outs are bad for the market and should not have been allowed. MS buying up huge game competitors and then restricting their choice on which platforms to develop for is clearly anti-competitive behavior.
That’s great news, hope this goes through, soon.
Hope it doesn’t. MS has a history of anticonsumer practices that goes all the way back to the 90s.
No matter what they say to the regulator MS will stop releasing any ABK existing IP onto Sony and Nintendo consoles.
Even though it will not directly effect me as a PC gamer it is still a bad thing for the industry as a whole.
MS is the last hope to safe some of the classic Blizzard titles as the state of Activision Blizzard as it is simply can’t get any worse.
Why? As in, why are they “the last hope”? What can they do that ActiBlizzKing cannot?
Me too, I know it’s not a popular opinion on here (for good reason) but this should put more pressure on PlayStation and drive competition there, make gsmepass more attractive and hopefully shake things up at Activision blizzard which could go either way, but worth the risk given how shitnthey currently are.
