WoW, Call of Duty, Overwatch 2, Diablo: Immortal, etc. etc. A lot of people might post vocally online about how awful a lot of stuff they've been doing is, but they're definitely making bank from stuff like the Overwatch 2 shop. It's generally only a vocal minority that talks about how much they dislike the microtransactions or skin prices.
There is money. The properties themselves are money mints.
The problem is that it's not enough money for the greedy owners behind the scenes who have nothing to do with the games themselves. Think the hedge fund owners, the banks, the note owners, etc. They want increasing amounts of money such that there's no money left to sustain the teams making the games.
Is there an example of a company making money in gaming with NFTs? From what I recall, everyone who talked about it has backed away from it. Generally accompanied by some statement about how it has no place in gaming.
Shed the FIFA license (fifa wants more and more licensing fees every year) - and spin Activision sports out as its own entity/product line.
The successful products are fully capable of sustaining their own production & staff, without having to feed the corporate coffers of a conglomerate that only wants increasing profits without any regard to the products and teams themselves.
Everyone at the company wins except for the overlords who lorded over the profits and continued on the path of consolidation for the only reason of lining their own pockets.
FIFA is EA, not Activision. Although they’ve taken your advice, FIFA 23 is the last one the licence the name, it’s going to be renamed EA Sports FC for the next one.
> What's left for Activision Blizzard? What can they do with a company this gutted?
Amazing IP! The loud minority hates every new game/expansion with a passion everything, but the majority of people I talked to enjoy playing overwatch 2, enjoy the new wow expansion, and most importantly we'd all (begrudgingly) buy any new warcraft/starcraft/diablo/overwatch game.
Your anecdata isn't backed up by sales numbers. WoW subscriber count peaked a decade ago at 12 million. Blizzard last publicly shared numbers in 2015 and it was under 5 million, and most third party estimates show it continuing to decline. Overwatch 2 will be difficult to directly compare to Overwatch 1 because it's F2P but time will tell.
Overwatch 2 is the most disappointing sequel to a game I’ve ever played. It’s literally overwatch 1 with like 3 new hero’s and a couple maps. Blows my mind that they had the nerve to slap a 2 on it.
That being said, I love the game because I lived Overwatch 1.
100% agree to all that. But I think every game being released is considered disappointing at this point. I'm trying to hold off judgement until PvE comes out ... hopefully this lifetime.
Anyways my quote is "enjoy playing", and sounds like we both fall into that category. The game engine and polish with the original is often overlooked IMO.
The FTC isn't even the first regulator to say no. I believe Microsoft has been trying to appease the UK already for a bit. I suspect it'll be very hard to get all of the necessary regulatory bodies to sign off at this point.
I am certainly not an expert but I do know that some of these deals go through with preconditions set by the government.
> “Microsoft has already shown that it can and will withhold content from its gaming rivals,” said Holly Vedova, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition. “Today we seek to stop Microsoft from gaining control over a leading independent game studio and using it to harm competition in multiple dynamic and fast-growing gaming markets.”
Based on the FTC's statement that reads to me, a layman, like they're trying to extract a commitment from Microsoft to publish future games on all platforms.
The FTC would seek to force MS to sign something saying "If you let us buy Blizzard, we will sell the game on Steam/Epic/MS Store on equal terms". Distribution is a great chokepoint for a monopolist, so the agreement would (theoretically, since it never works out in practice) take that away from MS.
I don't personally think the FTC is going for a consent decree here though, Lina Khan is about antitrust, I think they are trying to block mergers as a matter of business.
And then goes on to mention Starfield, a game that, according to rumors, Sony tried to get an exclusivity deal, Redfall that wasn't even announced nor an existing IP and cloud gaming which only has Nvidia as the other player while Sony forgot that they even had a service like that and only started complaining when Microsoft actually put effort in their service
The action in this case is less about the party in power than in the individuals involved. The FTC has been sleepwalking for decades. Biden appointed an FTC chairperson who has the reputation of being an anti-trust bulldog and appears to be committed to actually putting some teeth in the regulations. She can't especially go back in time, but she can certainly take action on what's upcoming.
I agree with this comment. I have no problems with Microsoft getting blocked, but disallow others also. Don't let Disney, Tencent or Apple, or some 3rd party then do the exact same thing.
The thing is, in the world of gaming, Microsoft buying games studios is making it less of a mononpoly. Sony has tons of solid PS exclusive because of their studios. Microsoft starts to make similar like moves and all of a sudden it's monoploy problem. WTF.
I suppose if you count Windows, Microsoft has captured way more of the market than Sony? Comes down to how the market and what (constitutes a monopoly) is defined though.
The Disney buyouts were made under a very different FTC and also a very different political climate. As well as a more naive view on monopolies by many in the regulatory/political sphere.
This move away from the consumer harm standard is recent and the new FTC chair is committed to making sure we go back to the old days of Anti-Trust.
Great store. I loved shopping there when I lived in Chicago. Great produce and products. Not expensive. And not many people walking around when I went on the weekends.
Let's not pretend that unauthorized copying is the same as stealing.
If a hundred billion aliens in another galaxy watched a pirated movie, nobody would even know. If the aliens came down to Earth and took all our water, we'd all die.
It's not the only option.. it the only good option.
Another option would be to purchase a VPN to route through a country where it is playable. But if you had to choose between the 2 options of pirating or paying more money to a different "shady" activity... I feel like the choice is pretty clear.
I wonder why people believe bypassing copyright law by pretending to be from another country is somehow better than bypassing copyright law by downloading the content.
Both are piracy, but the latter holds the stigmatism, and the former is openly advertised by podcasters and youtubers everywhere.
For the same reason the IP holder is entitled to a monopoly. The free market doesn't work without competition, and since IP law explicitly gives people monopolies, the only balancing force is piracy.
People in general don't want to pirate, but they will if it's the best option (just look at the often-cited example of Steam). That's the only thing keeping publishers in check. Without it, I'm sure prices for content would be much higher than they are right now.
This is a very silly argument. There are plenty of other entertainment options that are not the anime in question; no one has a right to experience a specific piece of creative content, just because they feel like it and don't like the distribution model. Lots of entitled downvoters on here; I at least applaud you for engaging in discussion.
Should you be able to attend an event without a ticket, just because that venue has a "monopoly" on that evening's entertainment? You're not reducing the enjoyment of others, nor are you decreasing the artist's revenue.
> Should you be able to attend an event without a ticket, just because that venue has a "monopoly" on that evening's entertainment? You're not reducing the enjoyment of others, nor are you decreasing the artist's revenue.
This isn't an accurate analogy because the OP has no option to enter the venue at all, even if they want to pay.
> no one has a right to experience a specific piece of creative content
The whole motive behind copyright is that society is entitled to culture. By granting artists a time-limited monopoly, they can be incentivized to create and release more and more content, which makes society's culture richer and more widely available to everyone.
So I'd argue that the status quo OP describes is contrary to the actual objective of copyright itself.
While I'm very much pro-IP, the concept of fair use exists. If the content is available for purchase, then piracy takes from Disney's profits. But if it is not available, and won't be, then pirating it doesn't affect Disney's profits. (There are obviously counter-arguments to this, contingent on the situation.)
Yes, it does, both indirectly, as fair use is an example of using copyrighted material and this is another one, and directly, because categorizing a use as fair use
involves the commercial impact of the use.
I'm not saying it's fair use. It isn't. The premise behind my comment relates to the underlying morality behind fair use, which doesn't involve obedience to the law.
Yeah, there is plenty of "content" to watch. The problem is that there tends to be content people want to watch, because word has gotten out that it is high quality, or (in this case) a trailer/ad looked appealing, and having it locked up on zero, maybe one, platforms doesn't really satisfy someone?
Eh as a gamer I don't like this. Unlike the majority of HN I don't hate MS, they have quality stuff as far as gaming goes. Blizzard on the other hand sucks so much nowadays, they ruined Overwatch, the whole Diablo Immortal fiasco, what they did with WoW Classic etc. And not even talking about the whole employee harassment scandal. They lost their ways long time ago. If anything I'd rather see them under MS.
Meanwhile there are countless games from AAAs to indies that are Steam or Epic Games exclusives but I guess that's also okay for whatever reason. Just because I can install multiple stores on my PC that doesn't make it better when it's locked in to one store.
I won't play Epic exclusive games. Valve put so much effort into Linux as a platform that they've bought my loyalty. When I see a game go from a Steam pre-order Epic exclusive it basically disappears from my RADAR.
Pre-orders on Steam turned into Epic exclusive caused an uproar. It came out on Steam a year later and I waited another year after that, then waited for a sale.
And got a patched, polished game with mods - fun for co-op with friends.
I don't think my "protest delayed" purchase 2+ years later made an impact on them. But it sated me.
Whatever. At lease Epic didn't make anything. There's a bug difference between getting an exclusive or a timed exclusive because you partially funded a studio over just dumping buckets of money on a game that's basically done to make sure it doesn't end up on Steam for a year. I don't want to reboot or mess with other emulators. Steam works on Linux. Let me buy your game on Steam.
Valve doesn't really do "exclusives" with Steam the way other platforms have exclusives. If a game is only available on Steam, it's not because their was a contract signed or money paid to enforce that. It's because the developer or publisher has decided not to make the game available elsewhere for their own reasons.
Because as the FTC will tell you, exclusives are generally good for competition except for a few circumstances with monopolist companies. They clearly think Microsoft owning Activision would be one of those circumstances.
Microsoft decided to make several of Bethesda's titles including Starfield and Redfall Microsoft exclusives despite assurances it had given to European antitrust authorities that it had no incentive to withhold games from rival consoles.
Sounds like the FTC does not trust Microsoft’s assurances.
I just don’t get that. Either the market advantage / concentration is ok or it’s not. Why let them have what they claim is an inappropriate share, just later?
Well I’ve loved the Fallout series and Skyrim, and paid for them several times, but now that MS has bought Bethesda, TES VI will not be n Playstation. I presume this means the next Fallout too. I’ve been Microsoft free (personally) for several years, and I’m not building a PC again just to play these games. I hate this kind of thing, even when it works in my favor (Horizon), and I don’t want this sort of crap to continue to proliferate.
> Unlike the majority of HN I don't hate MS, they have quality stuff as far as gaming goes.
This has not been my experience when playing any game that uses the UWP / Windows store API. I must've sunk 20+ hours into trying to get Forza 7 to start. It would launch and play fine maybe 1/20 times, and then exit to desktop with no error after about 20 minutes of play.
The other 19/20 times it wouldn't start, and the support online was abysmal. Suggestions include rebooting your machine, reinstalling the game (which was an 80GB download), reinstalling the GPU drivers, and I even got desperate enough to attempt a technique that was parroted on many forums as a fix, which is to install and immediately remove a completely unrelated Windows app store game. This worked a few times and then stopped working, or maybe it was just a coincidence. I spent a few hours trying to get my money back from MS and gave up on that too.
I miss the days when you could just run a .exe to start a game - if this is the future of gaming on Windows, then gaming on Linux could actually be a viable competitor.
This is why, even though I can afford it, I wouldn't get a gaming pc and I have a PS5.
In console it's just turn on and play, otherwise the game won't be available.
I would only use pc for some RTS games (like AoE, civ, and things along those lines) which don't need such huge compute requirements.
I have a Nintendo switch and love it for this. I play it a few times a year at most but (after charging) it just boots directly into Mario or Zelda or whatever game I select. Out of the desk drawer and into a game in under 30 seconds.
I can't get it how Steam can make an app store for Windows that works unlike Microsoft. It's not at all unique, because Dropbox was able to make a cloud storage product that works, unlike Microsoft. It seems like having access to the OS internals is a bug, not a feature.
It is unsolicited advice but I'd suggest that Microsoft get the Windows store working right before it spends billions on a source of games for it that as it is people won't be able to play. (... for that matter, am I the only one who sees links to unwholesome "Youtube shorts" on the Youtube home page that don't actually play? I have the problem both on Windows/Firefox and my iPad)
> I can't get it how Steam can make an app store for Windows that works unlike Microsoft.
The usual cause for something like this is that management is incentivizing for something that isn't quality. Velocity is the normal one that gets people, but there are a few others that occasionally get people (number of open tickets/lack of outrage on social media/etc).
It is, of course, possible that the team is incompetent, but that's usually an easier problem to fix, and if the team has had normal turnover, the odds of them having consistently incompetent ICs for years on end is pretty low.
Say what you want but OneDrive/Teams instant collaboration was a game changer when my former company got the licenses. My laptop died and I was back up and running on a new one within the hour. This was a couple years ago, it's table stakes now but it's not like they can't do cloud storage and syncing
I have nothing against MS. I’ve had multiple models of Xbox, for example.
I support this because MS is already huge (Windows, Office, Xbox) and Activision/Blizzard is huge.
There is already way too much centralization. EA owns too much. Honestly there may be some Sony shouldn’t have been allowed to acquire (I don’t keep track on either side).
So MS + Activision is just too centralized for me. If the argument is “we need this to compete with EA” then we should break up EA.
Nor do I hate MS. I have a love-hate relationship with their stack (more on the love side), and of course I don't like their anti-competitive behavior. They've done some great stuff under Satya.
I like to describe them as a many-headed beast; Some are benevolent, others less so.
Open sourcing a lot of stuff has been amazing for the MS ecosystem. But then they pull the Hot Reload move.
>Honestly there may be some Sony shouldn’t have been allowed to acquire
Some people have been floating around the idea that Sony could respond by acquiring Square Enix. Not sure if that is actually fiancially viable, but I would much prefer Sony and Microsoft acquire smaller studios (think Playground Games, Bluepoint Games) and leave bigger players like Activision and Square Enix alone.
I do. I've had Microsoft account hacked with no way of recovering it despite still owning the email associated with it. I continuously get email notifications from Microsoft stating that there's suspicious activity on the account but recovery is effectively impossible.
I won't buy anything at all that requires a Microsoft account to use.
1. Opened a MSN.net account in early 00's. Fake name/birthday provided as is the norm for the day and only email validation was required at the time.
2. Opened a Skype account in early 00's. Fake name/birthday information provided as is the norm for the day and only email validation was required at the time.
3. Microsoft merged Skype and MSN.net
4. Bought a Surface Pro in early 10's and that required a Microsoft account. Hated it and returned it, but now there's a CC and name associated with the account.
5. Account was hacked in mid 10's. Lost access.
6. Recovery workflow now involves "verifying" questions and answers that were never a part of the sign-up workflow, and secondary workflow involves "verifying" fake name/birthday information that's long since forgotten, or verifying purchases and prices and CC numbers (which have since changed), or verification of email.
7. Verification of email isn't enough because it's not a second factor. Want more verification.
8. MS phone support refuses to help, and brick & mortar staff have no capability to recover accounts
The Nintendo Switch (114m) outsold the Xbox One (51m) , Series S, and Series X (12m together) combined. And both the Playstation and (especially) Xbox suffer in that most of their games are also available on PC (usually much more cheaply).
There is also Embracer who are not on as many people's radar as they should be considering just how many studies they have been gobbling up. I wish there was a good answer for stopping this ultra-capitalistic consolidization that is going on in the games industry - best we can do is buy from independents but those are often bought up once they get big enough.
Yeah, this basically summarizes my thoughts regarding this issue.
To over-simplify, I foresee two possible outcomes.
1. The merge makes AB worse. That's fine because while I somewhat enjoy their games, they aren't doing anything ground-breaking and their existing catalog of games is good enough for me to keep playing if I ever get the urge for something they've made. And if they fold in a flaming wreckage of nonsense, that's fine, because again, their existing catalog of games is fine as is, and I wouldn't greatly miss future entries.
2. The merge makes AB better. Great! Maybe some of their existing IPs are improved beyond simple incremental improves and maybe even some new IPs that are worth playing come about. I see this is a win for everyone.
I do see the side of "MS has enough money to bully companies like Sony", but the thing is, Sony is still the clear leader in the console gaming space. This means any concession that MS gives out end up feeling like handouts to the market leader, which just feels strange to me.
But at the end of the day, if that means agreements to release titles like Call of Duty on Playstation (is anyone really concerned whether they come out on Nintendo platforms?) that's fine by me as well.
> This means any concession that MS gives out end up feeling like handouts to the market leader, which just feels strange to me.
I don't find this to be the case at all. SONY is market leader in consoles because they've been doing a better job. Microsoft cross-funding their way into a monopoly wouldn't make MS decision making any better, would it?
As an extreme example: Imagine MS buying out all major game studios in 2013 (they certainly have had the money to do it). You -- as the consumer -- would've either been stuck with a console that made every wrong decision, but has every game on it. Or a console made with better decisions but with no games. How is preventing this a handout to the market leader?
Unless Sony is "doing a better job" solely at selling copies of Call of Duty, then I'm not convinced that this merger is a huge threat to their market position. People aren't buying Sony consoles because of the games put out by AB.
I just don't see this merger moving the needle much on the competition between the two companies.
You seem to be highly unaware of the CoD bubble. CoD is selling like hotcakes and is definitelythe main decider for a sizable amount of people in their console purchase. The purchase would recapture the US market in the next cycle for sure. Even if MS rebooted their 2013 fiasco.
I just don't understand how this merger would be even entertained by the FCC. The only reason MS is lagging behind Sony is because of their own incompetence (outside of Japan). Allowing this much of a cross funding to offset incompetence shouldn't event be on the table.
> Blizzard on the other hand sucks so much nowadays
It's so disappointing to me that Activision kept Blizzard as part of the name during the merger. Decision makers at Blizzard were replaced with decision makers who Activision liked and now the company is just Activision with Blizzard's IP.
Everyone who made the Blizzard name worth paying attention to was either gone or pushed into a different role by the time Activision ruined their name, but people still say things like "Blizzard sucks" instead of "Activision sucks" (hell, even "Activision Blizzard sucks" would feel better).
I'm don't even think that it's wrong to say "Blizzard sucks"; it just sucks that it's true.
I don't care how good any one company is at $thing; that doesn't mean they should be allowed to own the entire market for $thing. That's just not healthy for a society or an economy.
There's already way, way, way too much consolidation in industry today (not just "the games industry"; all of industry). What we need to be doing is breaking up many of these megacorporations, and then reversing the burden of proof for mergers & acquisitions: not "we'll stop this if it's proven that it would be harmful," but "we won't allow this unless it's proven to be beneficial", with a fairly high bar.
It just seems so absurd to me to see so many people who trumpet the power of the "free market", but then advocate for this kind of hyper-consolidated situation as if it's remotely like a "free market". Yes, sure, I can buy my $thing from Oppressive Megacorp A, B, or C, all of whom have a huge interest in maintaining the status quo and avoiding meaningful competition.
I think that a duopoly, or other very small number of meaningful participants in a market, is fundamentally much less healthy and much less beneficial to customers than a larger number of smaller competitors, whether or not they have explicitly colluded to partition the market (as, for instance, in the ISP market).
Since you didn’t answer my question we can assume that the answer is “yes they do meaningfully compete” which is good because that’s obviously the case.
There are on the order of 10 video game companies with over a billion usd in revenue. There are 3 distinct console manufacturers (4 if you count the steam deck, 5 if you include PCs). Then there’s the mobile gaming market, which has all the big players plus a bunch of others.
Duopoly’s and small markets goodness or badness is irrelevant in this situation.
It makes me squirm but Overwatch 2, Diablo Immortal, and Wow classic were smash hits all. Blizzard is more profit than ever, entertaining more people than ever.
That said…I agree with you, though I doubt MS would help.
I completely support thwarting monopolistic practices and even trying to prevent them from being possible. I just hope Blizzard can one day be completely divorced from Activision. Whether Microsoft is a better fit, I cannot say, but I do feel as if Blizzard has been making one poor decision after another ever since the acquisition in 2008 -- and only very recently have things looked somewhat brighter for them.
As a childhood fan of all things Blizzard (clocked in thousands of hours on their games), Activision has destroyed any respect I had for this company. They defiled every franchise, and Diablo Immortal is a sickening game.
Sincerely hope the deal falls through and the company goes bankrupt.
I actually only (re-)learned of the game recently (I recall its original announcement), but not enough to know anything more about it and I have been meaning to go back to it and check it out. Do you have a short version of what lends you that opinion?
I think the biggest issue people point to is you have to sink literally 10 years or $100,000 into the game to fully upgrade a character with how the rewards are structured/priced.
I've been playing Diablo 1 for about two decades, not every day and not every year, but I assure you it is countless hours. I have not found all the items that would perfect my characters. It takes an extraordinary amount of time to find them. Some items I may never find in all my life. I enjoy playing the game. Some people are willing to play, some pay.
So by 10 years I don't mean playing casually for a decade, it's literally 90,000 hours. And Diablo Immortal is a little different being a PVP game, having good gear doesn't just let you solo dungeons, it means people paying their way into kicking your ass every time.
It's fundamentally "pay to win" - money spent matters more than skill or mechanical mastery. Since it has a PvP mode, this means that if you're not whaling you're just krill for the whales to kill.
To be honest, I thought Diablo Immortal was pretty good if it weren’t for the micro transactions. The fact that it was a free game made certain parts super slow and grindy to incentivize purchases, but if it were a real game you have to buy, I’d have thought it was pretty good. It makes me think the game designers there are still good, they’re just held back by the business people.
Shift... to cartoon fantasy art style? You mean the style of The Lost Vikings, Rock'n'Roll Racing, Warcraft (all of them), and so on? Any games not in that style are outliers.
These elements were present but better balanced. The cartoon aspect for 16-bit games like Lost Vikings is on point. In Warcraft 2 you had a perfect mix of seriousness / grit with humor. Over the top art AND comic/anime style AND polished don't work for me. It's Fantasy, the subject is already silly, humor can be present but everything else has to be serious, it's a fine balance otherwise it devolves into parody.
Another way to put it is that for me it worked while Samwise contributed but was in check.
Edit: Now I'm not blaming them, from a business perspective they had to follow the shifting zeitgeist and it obviously worked, old school D&D/Warhammer/Heavy Metal/... were totally uncool at the time especially for teenage millennials.
> I like what Beamdog have done with Neverwinter Nights 1
Double the price for minimal fixes? They didn't even bother including fixes for known issues which known workarounds available on the vault like e.g. HotU companions sometimes not using most of their abilites because the AI selects the mount ability as the best available one.
Really, these old games should just be released to the community to maintain them like iD used to do. And if someone like Beamdog wants to profit off such maintenance then they better be able to do so without taking the original down from sale because they know they can't actually compete with vanilla + community patches.
Pretty much. They're responsible for an employee committing suicide. The Microsoft acquisition was the last hope of getting rid of them. So much for that.
Totally, but also excited to see what ex-blizzard creatives at Frost Giant Studios and their upcoming RTS Stormgate will bring. Happy to see the talent reform elsewhere.
The track record of "ex-<Popular Game/Company> devs/etc" splitting off for new companies/IPs isn't that compelling to me personally. Lots of games have been sold with that angle, and few that I can remember were able to come even close to the previous titles.
That's true, and somewhat related of what I think about nostalgia.
Sometimes it's not that they lost the touch or that they sold themselves. It's just that we're not teenagers anymore, in an old internet cafe playing on LAN with our friends. Even if a similar game is coming back, the entire moment with all its context is not.
Still, I'm happy to see they're still alive and faithful to their roots.
> Lots of games have been sold with that angle, and few that I can remember were able to come even close to the previous titles.
Even revenue for the developer, or in enjoyment for the user? Because Torchlight (ex-Diablo-II ICs) was a humdinger of a D-II sequel in terms of gameplay, but sales? Not so much.
This makes me think that the biggest value that the studio brings to the table for revenue is brand recognition.
IOW, it doesn't matter how good the game is, brand recognition gets you over the line sometimes.
Overwatch launched in 2016 to critical and commercial acclaim. I would say the opposite, it's in the last few years that Blizzard seemed to really go off the rails.
I think Overwatch was a sign of things to come. The loot box monetization, the focus on competitive play to the detriment of other elements, and the very rigid structure of the game (can't choose map, role queue) all felt like downgrades from Blizzard's previous efforts. At least the gameplay was good for a while.
Overwatch was the first Blizzard game that I liked less and less the more they patched it.
As someone who grew up paying £25-60 for a brand new game, I find it pretty insane that we've been trained to want games for free despite it costing millions to develop and run dedicated servers for millions of players.
I tried out Overwatch 2, despite all the negative press it is fun and sweaty. I had plenty of fun despite not playing as Kiriko and I'm sure I could easily derive 10s if not 100s of hours before feeling a need to unlock Kiriko.
If a game is taking so much of your time and you have a job, why isn't it ok to just pay a bit to unlock a hero?
I'd take these kinds of monetisation over destiny 2 which didn't even have p2w or clash royale (before season pass)
I'm not convinced the acquisition was responsible. The problem I've perceived (with my very limited wisdom on the topic) is that once they made it huge with World of Warcraft, shipping a "pay-once + expansions" product is just such a financial footnote that it's seen as a distraction.
I wonder if that's why the "Real Money Auction House" from Diablo 3 existed.
WoW was too big of a cash cow for too long, and sucked the oxygen out of the room at Blizzard; everyone who was involved with making non-WoW games left.
What percentage of that 300M do you believe went to cost?
According to the article they generated roughly the same amount of revenue in 4 months as the previous record breaking game did in an entire year. I wish I had that kind of reputation damage.
Mobile games live and die by aggressive marketing. With conversion ratio in the single digit, it's not uncommon for half of their operating costs to be advertising. And then you add the actual housekeeping and R&D on top of that...
> Mobile games live and die by aggressive marketing.
That is a good point, the amount of raid shadow legends adverts on the internet have become a meme at this point. I haven't seen any ads for Immortals here in the US and the financial report doesn't break down marketing spend by property.
Definitely. Talking about WoW in particular. It's less lucrative now, but they were everywhere a decade+ back. Burning Crusade to Lich King era. Spelling out the names of their websites with orchestrated corpse die-offs in big cities like Stormwind and Ogrimmar.
I am saying comparing a mobile only game to a MMORPG back when gamers were willing to pay to play MMOs is misleading. Which MMOs are making 14B in yearly revenue in today's entertainment market?
According to the article I linked Immortal generated roughly the same amount of revenue in 4 months as Raid Shadow Legends (the previous record holder) did in their best year. That is a domination of that gaming niche.
Do you have a source on this $7B a year profit figure? I've tried to find it and can't find anything even close to $7B revenue let alone profit going back to 1994.
$7b seems wrong. That would require about 40 million subscribers each paying $15 a month. Peak subscribers was 12 million and many would be paying for slightly cheaper long term subs.
They didn't do that much much at the peak of WoW. There were some pets you got by buying the collector's edition of the game but that was it. No paid mounts, no server transfers, no level boosts.
The paid stuff was a monetization tactic after the decline.
So many fun franchises are basically dead because they aren't nearly as profitable as a freemium game and selling digital garbage. Single player FPS is basically dead. RTSes are also effectively dead. The only place you'll find such things is from indy devs and they don't have anywhere near the budget to make something as good as what we used to get :(.
There was a new AoE game but it’s struggling to compete with AoE2. It’s like trying to release a chess 2. People question why they would spend money to buy the new one when they still have the old one.
People are largely still completely satisfied with what they have now.
In sc21/2 your base starts 95% walled (and indestructible) with a choke that you can completely wall with about 3 buildings, but few would argue that makes sc21/2 boring.
In relation to RTS games, I think it's a combination of people are largely satisfied with what we have now combined with the fact that MOBAs, FPS, and RTS are probably more appealing to the average gamer.
Give it a chance before saying such fatalistic statements. Play some lesser known ones. I mean this is a site that found it's roots in startups, and they're are all about being the upstart and being the hope for something better.
RTS newbies get immediately destroyed because RTSes are mostly dead, meaning that all online players have been playing it for decades and know a lot. An RTS with a steady influx of new players and matchmaking would work just fine, if anyone were to get one going.
It does (and at least when it came out) it was relatively decent.
The problem occurs when the game has been out long enough that all the active players are leagues ahead of a new player; either they wait forever for a match or get steamrolled.
There's plenty of people playing SC2 online at ~every skill level, right now. Queue times are not long at all.
The main problem is that it's a 12 year-old game, that's been largely abandoned by the developer. The other main problem is that unlike a skill-based MOBA, you can't blame anyone else for your losses. The third main problem is that the game is incredibly stressful, demands 100% of your attention, and the smallest mistake can lose the game for you.
The patch was put on the Player Test Realm (PTR), which is almost like an open beta. I wouldn't say that it was "released", more like pushed to staging or open beta.
Sure, and it's had a minor, but excellent balance patch earlier in the year, but it's also been more-or-less abandoned for a few years, and is quite clearly not being actively developed.
Can you imagine a modern remake with up to date blizzard strategies?
They'd probably add commander level and equipable commander items which grant buffs to your units. You'd have a chance of getting one item each time you win a pvp fight and you can increase the quality/rarity of the drop by using cash shop items. Oh, and the rare items might require a higher commander level... Obviously you'd also be able to buy temporary buffs to your XP gain, so you can equip them sooner.
They could maybe even focus more on group pvp (i.e. 4vs4) so the whales can carry scrubs to wins. That would give them a chance of loot even if they're just there to be farmed and will make them properly fawn over the mighty whales that let them gain their pointless upgrades.
Back when I played it, there was a 50 game skill test for new players which determined which of the major rank pools you were placed in.
Those first 50 games were crazy because you were matched randomly with other new and established players, so sometimes you would play someone really good who would steamroll you in the first 5 minutes, and sometimes you got someone who had at most played the scripted campaigns against the AI and thought they could sit there for the first 30 minutes slowly building up an army.
It was actually pretty fun not knowing which way it would go, and whenever we matched with newbies my partner and I got to experiment with a bunch of different strategies that would never work in a real game.
> played the scripted campaigns against the AI and thought they could sit there for the first 30 minutes slowly building up an army.
This right here is my fundamental problem with multiplayer RTS games. The fun I get out of them is in the slow burn long buildup, but other players always find ways to optimize the early game so they win fast and never actually get to the fun part where everyone has massive bases lobbing nukes at eachother. The fun way to play is not the optimal way to play.
It's now been about 10 years since I've even bothered trying an RTS online.
Yeah I've felt the same way at times, especially when the armor/weapon types make it very rock paper scissors. It wasn't as blatant in the original StarCraft, but WarCraft 3 and StarCraft 2 seemed to go hard into counters against certain types of units, so someone who either scouts a bit better than you do or picks an army composition that happens to perfectly counter yours will mop the floor with you.
My partner and I had way more fun in those early games when we could stretch it out to 30-60 minutes sometimes. Once you're playing against ranked people who are there to win it's just a mad rush to the first or second tech tier.
Yeah, I was aware of the different armor types in SC1, but I thought they turned it up to 11 in SC2. Maybe they brought it down to the first 2 tiers of units? It didn't feel like armor types really came into play as early in the game. The impression I got was that you could get away with massing a single type of unit much more easily in SC1.
There's a game mode in AoE2DE where everyone's behind strong walls at the start. It takes a while to be able to bring them down. So you get to turtle for a while. A game mode like this is what you'd like to play.
I don't mean to be rude (I'm a very bad Starcraft II enthusiast) but most people who complain about this problem seem to want to play a solo game for 30 minutes and then eventually meet the other player in the field of battle at the half-hour mark. That's an obvious no-go, you can't ignore 90% of the game and expect to have fun.
The way to beat players who play strong openers is to play a strong opener yourself, but not necessarily all-in aggressive. If you want to get to the late game you enjoy you must get better at the early game. Harass the other guy early, scout their build, make sure you're building counters to what the other player is playing. Defend well. Deny their economy here and there. Inevitably crush them with nukes and capital ships after 30 minutes of solid fundamentals.
(Starcraft is still a lot of fun and I'd encourage you to get back in to RTS playing)
> you can't ignore 90% of the game and expect to have fun.
I think maybe what you meant to say was "... and expect to _win_"
Plenty of people have fun turtling (:
This is one thing I liked about Total Annihilation — defense tech was relatively strong, so some amount of turtling and racing to get high tech artillery (eg) was a viable approach.
There's plenty of turtling for Terran and Protoss in SC2. Defense tech like cannons, planetarys, shield batteries, and bunkers help. It's definitely not fool proof but is classically something people struggle against.
I think a larger issue is that there's like 3-5 games to get ranked and then a bit more to get really ranked properly. And by SC2 design the early game is resource constrained so decisions are important and even with the right decisions execution is hard.
Try playing Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance Forever - it's a Total Annihilation sequel that's now community supported. It's got a decent AI and an active community of all levels. It's on Steam and often goes on sale.
Well, honestly both! SC2 in particular is a game of rock-paper-scissors, you must know what your opponent is building in order to stay alive. If you turtle blindly against a half-decent player you'll get eaten alive.
I used to play Age of Empires in treaty mode. You had XX minutes where you couldn't attack one another so just focused super hard on macro. Utter chaos when the treaty period ended as everyone had max size armies. Lagged the hell out of my computer. Good times
It was a fairly popular variant of the game too, never had trouble finding matches
Personally, I think RTSs are way easier to watch. Its easier to understand what is going on at a base level (i.e. build an army and beat the other side).
MOBAs seem super confusing if you dont play. Its 30 minutes of nothing happening, and then like 15 seconds of people getting really excited and then the game is over.
Yeah, I always found watching MOBAs boring but I never really played them; at least RTS I knew roughly what they were doing and doing better than I could.
I disagree that you can “just watch” MOBAs. I don’t play any MOBAs, but I will occasionally watch them. If I don’t have a commentator guiding me along to tell me what is happening (to some degree) then it makes no sense to me.
That's a factor. But the bigger factor is it's harder to freemium an RTS without destroying the game.
The fun of RTSes is the learning curve, but throw in a bunch of "you can buy a special unit for $10" and all the sudden the game balancing is destroyed. That leaves you with inconsequential things like avatar skins to sell and very few people would buy those.
Couple that with the fact that new players aren't likely to spend hours online playing the game (because they get destroyed) and you've got a major problem.
For me, the fun of RTSes was in single player games and lan parties.
This was after they sold the game at a fair price for many many years. The "freemium" play was I imagine, in part taken because sales flatlined.
I remember the transition. I kinda hated it, to be honest. Not because of the drops (they were introducing hats and loot well before this) but because the influx of players were...low quality
A large playerbase and good matchmaking could solve this. Ironically the best way for any game to get a large enough playerbase for fair matchmaking and low queue times is to go free-to-play.
this wasn't always a problem though. Warcraft 3 and both Starcraft games had a large and diverse audience for a long time. From competitive players to people who enjoyed the story despite the fact that they're quite difficult multiplayer games.
Elden Ring and the Souls games are difficult and even to a point intentionally alienating but have had massive success including in the mainstream.
I don't know what it is but I feel there's something else going on with the rapid decline of RTS besides the difficulty.
Elden ring and Horizon Zero Dawn are amazing solo player games. I don’t wanna play pvp multiplayer. I like Co-Op multiplayer with my buddies. Elden Ring with full game co-op would be amazing. I’d buy all the DLC they could release in a heartbeat.
Starcraft 2 is the only game the thought of queueing up for a 1v1 game gets my heartrate up (ladder anxiety). It's not so much the winning or losing, but the fact that games are just 20+ minutes of full-tilt. Whether you're winning or losing, there's zero downtime because there's always something that needs to be done.
Other competitive games like CS/Valorant gives you downtime in between rounds and when you die. Similarly with MOBAs, travel time in between your base and lane, when you die. Even fighting games, when you get a hit in, it's back to muscle memory for your bread and butter combo, and rounds are much shorter.
On an unrelated note, I think this lack of downtime is partly responsible for StarCraft pros suffering as much from RSI. There's no clear downtime while playing and the hands have to be going at speed the entire time.
Are all RTS players interested in online play? I like RTSs, played a certain number, but I've never played online. But RTS devs focusing a lot of their efforts on multiplayers, effort that are going to be wasted on a good portion of the potential market who's just not into MP and is never going to touch the online mode.
> I like RTSs, played a certain number, but I've never played online.
I realized I wrote a mistake: I did play a handful of MP matches of World in Conflict after finishing the (very enjoyable) single-player campaign. It was fun, but not as much as the single player portion; and I never invested enough time for it to be fun.
I'd love to play an RTS that was APM capped somehow. Maybe in a tiered fashion. As it stands the design of SC2 style RTS is just insanely stressful.
I could see something like SC2 being fun with 2-3 people playing 1 player's role at a time. 1 person on the econ, 2 people on the army. Or much better AI that you can override selectively, so if you want to handle the fighting you can, or if you want to handke the econ you can.
PC is still king for esports and competitive gaming (outside of niches like fighting games or sports). League and Dota continue to be among the most watched events online.
A tiny nitpick - Horizon Zero Dawn and God of War (not the recent sequel that just came out) aren't console exclusives anymore (but have been for the longest time), you can buy both of them on Steam now.
Just buy a controller? They're pretty cheap and the superior way to play many games. Also IMO it's more relaxing to sit back with a controller, kb&m I find is more high-intensity.
Yup, many ported games suffer a lot in terms of optimization, especially when they outsource to other smaller studios to do the job for them.
But its certainly better than not having story games at all.
Sony's story games are really really good, and they finally realized that releasing on PC is a win-win for everyone, more money for Sony, more games for PC, because most of the time no one wants to switch from PC to PlayStation
Only if you just want to play singleplayer. If you're into multiplayer and not already an expert at Starcraft or AoE2 then good luck finding games around your skill level.
When people speak of RTS games, they are actually referring to StarCraft-like real time tactic simulators with optional unit production and resource gathering components. The titles developed by Paradox may not be turn based, but they have more common with the other 4X games like Civilization.
I also don't think RTS is dead but the category has been stale for some time. I grew up playing Age of Empires 2, and the game still has a healthy player base with regular new content being added. However compared to the turn of the century the pace of innovation has definitely slowed down.
Aside from maybe Company of Heroes 3, what RTS games have came out anytime recently at all? I want some mid-to-late 90s style RTS games (C&C, AoE, TA, War2, SC, SC2) where you collect resources, build and expand bases, and wage war on your enemies.
Supreme Commander: Forged Alliances has a significant community with FA Forever. (https://www.faforever.com/) It reworked all the stock solo missions with updated units and co-op. There are survival modes, phantom modes. There is a reasonable community online for ladder or team vs team play. In a week or so, the SupCom:FA game should be a couple bucks when the steam sales spin up. Well worth your time one remembers Total Annihilation fondly.
AoE4 is a refinement of AoE2. Frostgiant is planning to release a beta of the Starcraft spiritual successor next summer. Immortal: Gates of Pyre is in alpha
None of Paradox' games are turn based, they're real time (but pausable). Their own description for the genre is "grand strategy", which is IMO between what is classically understood as "RTS" and "4X".
Classically understood in video gaming context, the terms "RTS" and "4X" are pretty much mutually exclusive, even though some 4X titles are real-time, as you've noted.
That wasn't my understanding, and Wikipedia disagrees with you:
> 4X (abbreviation of Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate) is a subgenre of strategy-based computer and board games, and include both turn-based and real-time strategy titles.
Well, technically speaking all those grand stategy games by paradox have turns - one month in EU4. Every player queues up actions in between turns, but they are doing it at the same time. IMO if we're being pedantic it's neither and is something in between skewed towards turn-based.
It's nothing like "pure" RTS like starcraft where everything is actually real time. Their 4X games have: speed control, pause, turns (days and months, depending on a game and action). If you remove ability make turns simulatinusly and make a single turn into a day - not much will change in gameplay other than it will take longer.
You don't 'queue up' actions in EU4 or any other Paradox grand strategy - you indicate something has to happen (start building something or move a formation somewhere) and it start happening immediately, in real time. The day/month/year doesn't serve any practical purpose outside of orientation for the end user. Nothing happens at the end of the day/month/year except for actions initiated earlier who's end happens to coincide.
The past ten years have been good for single player FPS games though, I don’t know how anyone could think the genre is dead.
New Wolfenstein and Doom games, yearly call of duty, halo infinite, Titanfall 2, half life alyx, super hot, metro exodus, black mesa, destiny 2, deep rock galactic, the list goes on.
I just... what you define as fun isn't apparently what others define as such, at least when it comes to voting with their dollars.
I can't understand folks who don't understand this concept. You are not the only opinion in this world, and the media and critics are incentivized to create drama.
Doom Eternal came out in 2020, and LoL is one of the most popular games of all time. SC2 just released a huge patch that revamped a lot of balance issues that had cropped up over the past decade...
Gaming has never been more diverse and well funded. It's wild to me that you see the huge selection you've got available to you and could possibly believe we're in anything but the best gaming era of all time right now.
People vote with their dollars against their own best interest all the time - typical examples include narcotics (don't take that comparison for more than I meant it to be, it's just an example of how people buy "fun stuff" that they objectively should not) and in-app purchases in cheesy mobile games. Profit motive can only guide profit seeking companies to serve people's happiness to the extent that people can exert self control, and that doesn't work very well.
You are confusing happiness with something else. The problem of language dominates these conversations, and by not being careful you risk being refuted by Plato's Socrates 2500 years ago in the Meno among other things.
It's kind of unsubstantiatable, but I think capitalism is fundamentally a poor fit for "high quality art".
The gaming industry is experiencing the same hyper-commercialization that the movie industry has experienced.
You can argue that the super hero movies of today and the remakes are "better" than older movies on the best objective metric we have (how much revenue they generate), and that we're in "the best era of film of all time" right now, but... I don't know who truly believes that, subjectively. :p It feels wild to believe that. I certainly don't, and I don't for gaming either.
Funny story: I got Doom Eternal about a year after it came out. I needed to make an account, even though I only play singleplayer. When first opening it, I got bombarded by pop-ups from a dozen DLC and update cycles, like a little history of its updates thus far. I cringed at the social media-like network integration stuff in the main menu. I play for a few days. On like the fourth day, when opening the game, this pop-up appears in-game, but it's empty. It's like some network notice, but it's broken. The pop-up is blank. There's no way to get past it. Nothing helps. The game essentially bricked itself via its own botnet bloatware (a thing an older game would never do). Apparently, it happens to console and PC users alike, and there was no solution around it. It's as if it accidentally ripped you, the user, off, in that a digital product just stopped working. (Let's not even mention the plight of future gamers trying to simulate the always-online DRM so they can play it in an emulator. Hey--at least Bethesda removed the kernel-level anticheat following backlash, allowing the game to run on Linux again!) Luckily, even though I was past the usual playtime limit, Steam gave me a full refund. :D
Also, Diablo Immortal is probably more profitable than all the previous Diablo games put together, and I'll leave it to you to decide if that's a case where profitability or even popularity maps with whatever we truly mean by "quality".
> The gaming industry is experiencing the same hyper-commercialization that the movie industry has experienced.
I agree, a lot of parallels can be drawn between modern AAA games and superhero movies. the quest to reach the largest market has resulted in products without much in the way of nuance or new ideas. this is kinda what you have to do if you're going to spend $250mm on a game or movie. even achieving wide appeal within a single large country isn't enough to reliably make that back; you have to make something appealing (or at least inoffensive) to most of the world.
at the same time, I think you are missing just how much the gaming market has expanded since 10-20 years ago. while very successful for their time, games like halflife are very niche by today's standards. there's no like-for-like comparison between cod:mw2 and a game from the early/mid 2000s.
if you expect AAA games in 2023 to scratch the same itch as they did back then, you will surely be disappointed. they aren't designed for the same audience. but by and large, more money is available to fund development for all sorts of games today. concepts that would have been a janky mod for some other games ~20 years ago are full-fledged titles of their own now. ymmv of course, but I find that when I lose the expectation for modern AAA-level graphics, there are tons of great new games available in recent years.
I agree, I've played a bunch of games recently due to being disabled and in the 90s and there have been many really excellent games in the past decade. While I'm sure there were some at the time, I can't remember playing any that had a particularly "artistic" feel to them in the 90s, while I've played a number recently. Games like RiME, 8doors, Hollow Knight, Little Bug, Wolfstride, Rakuen, 140, The Witness, most of Amanita's games, The Longest Road on Earth (arguably more a music video than game, but still), The Talos Principle, Haven, Arise, and Golf Club Wasteland all have a strong artistic feel to me and I enjoyed them (up through some of Amanita's are some of my favorites), and a bunch more have just a bit less distinctly artistic feel IMO (like Guacamelee, Beatbuddy, A Short Hike, or Calico, also some of my favorites). Of course, different people have different ideas what makes a game "artistic" and enjoy different types of games.
GOG still exists to avoid most single player DRM issues (some games have limited single player content that requires an internet connection) and with a better refund policy, although unfortunately they don't have good Linux support. I have an entirely offline game system and rarely have any kind of issue due to that (Zachtronics games are some of the worst since you can't see how well you did on a level without an internet connection, unless they changed that since I last tried one a few years ago). GOG has about 4500 games at this point (catalog shows a few hundred more with "hide DLC and extras" but some are miscategorized DLC), not nearly as many as Steam but still quite a few (unfortunately, some developers don't keep the GOG version up to date).
> I can't understand folks who don't understand this concept.
Ok, very simple example, are slot machines fun?
I think anyone can objectively look at a slot machine and say "no, that's really not fun". Yet, people spend their entire retirements on slot machines. People DIE pumping quarters into a slot machine. People wear diapers to slot machines. Slot machines are HIGHLY profitable for casinos (which is why they have them).
Fun and profit are not the same thing. Some games, such as Diablo Immortal, have realized that addicting is more profitable than fun. The entire game industry has learned that if you randomize rewards (loot boxes) you can trigger addiction without having a fun game.
> You are not the only opinion in this world
I'd look into the mirror before giving this advice. I realize that some people find gambling fun. Whatever floats your boat. But I also realize that there is such a thing as gambling addiction and it is highly profitable.
The proper resolution to this is the realization that fun != good. Fun is a property of context, and anything can be made fun with the right context. Multiplayer is the greatest cheatcode to generating fun -- with friends, poking a bloating corpse and playing the ol' hoop n' stick is fun.
Fun cannot be discussed, or argued, because you cannot properly share that context with others, and you cannot deny the reality of their context.
But good is a property of the game itself -- it's essentially the answer to the question "how well does the game achieve the goals it chases, and how well does it choose its goals?". This is still somehow subjective, but dramatically less so -- we can actually discuss it in a manner that's sensible. To a degree, the discussion has to factor in that we have different beliefs of what those goals are, and whether those are good goals to have, but this is true of any judgement.
And when talking about whether a movie, book, game, etc is any good, no one gives a shit whether you had "fun" playing it, because that tells us nothing about whether its good. It just tells us "your" experience -- your specific relationship to the work -- more about you than it... but we're not talking about you.
This is all well and good, and I agree, fun can be different things to different people. So can good.
But that wasn't the comment I was responding to. The comment I responded to made the positive assertion "Things are fun because they are profitable"
> what you define as fun isn't apparently what others define as such, at least when it comes to voting with their dollars.
If you want to change the argument to "fun is unknowable" I can get behind that statement. However, I think the slot machine example is a really good one to prove that fun and profit are not the same thing. Even if you want to argue that the slot machines can be fun, I think you'd have a hard time arguing that addicts to slots are all having a blast.
What's changed in the gaming industry is more focus on profit and less on fun. The gaming industry has learned is what B.F. Skinner discovered decades ago
[1], how to get repeat behaviors out of someone with randomize rewards.
I think you're barking up the wrong tree here, friend. You seem to be missing my point, which is that "fun" is subjective and there simply is no definition of "fun" that applies to everyone.
Your whole "slot machine" example is predicated on my response being, "Well no, slot machines aren't fun." However, I do think slot machines are loads of fun! Not for me, but for the millions of people who sit there, spend very tiny sums of money (think like $5 for literally 12 hours of chill entertainment), and get to feel good about themselves while they do it.
> SC2 just released a huge patch that revamped a lot of balance issues
I feel like tossing in a patch from SC2 as an indicator that it's actively being supported is a little misleading. SC2 had the opportunity to compete with LoL and Dota2 for viewership but Blizzard made a LOT of mistakes with the first expansion that alienated players and sent them to LoL, Dota2, or CSGO.
Their game design philosophy and slow patch rhythm sabotaged the momentum that the pro scene had been building (warp gate tech, infinite value units like Brood Lords and Swarm Hosts, frontloading all Terran power into Stim units, etc). They also catered the ladder experience solely for competitive players, they didn't introduce many (if any) casual-friendly modes until far too late.
They also broke SC2 into three $60 boxes products, segmenting the multiplayer each time, right at the dawn of the free to play MOBA era on PC. My entire SC2 friend group ditched Heart of the Swarm for League of Legends and never looked back.
But also, just not being able to play cooperatively with friends was the final death knell. SC was designed for an era where you played alone and then you played against others who played alone because there weren’t a lot of anyone playing SC or anything really.
LoL unlocked an entire demographic of kids who wanted to play with friends. A great explosion in online VC tech helped foster this and the rest is history. Gaming is now a social activity and all the top sellers right now effectively leverage this.
If you want something new and good, I don't think that you should be looking at franchises. Especially not these days when devs are not stuck with boxed releases, so are able to release early and keep polishing and extending the same game for more than a decade.
And I'm going to have to disagree about "not as good as we used to get". Is there any question that Zero-K/Spring (or BAR/Spring) aren't way better than Total Annihilation (ok, maybe not for the orchestral score), despite being entirely community-made ?
What mistakes are you concerned about?
I most value the existance of utility spells in a crpg. Spell crafting sytems are also super fun. ES has had both of those elements within some games.
Other games with those qualifications:
Ultima underworld
Arx fatalis
Two worlds series
Deus ex series
The obsidian games typically have plenty of utility spells, but not always.
Oh don't get me wrong I've loved all the ES games so far, but they do show a trend of stripping out exactly that fun experimental part. In Morrowind the game even eggs you on to do the silly Jump + Levitate/Feather Fall hijinks by dropping that dude from the sky while you're walking. And in general the magic and alchemy system is bonkers in the good way. The game encourages you to break it. Not to mention the "fast travel system" of the various utility spells which I found quite immersive.
Oblivion has some of that stuff too but it's definitely simplified.
Skyrim has no spell crafting at all, which means combat becomes "mash mouse button" or "sneaky arrow". Lycanthropy is pretty fun though, but also wears out. Mods definitely saved the game since they add all the crazy shit that is missing.
The trend is quite obvious though. Don't get me wrong, I'll still definitely play the shit out of ES6, I just don't feel it will reach the glory of Morrowind.
> Ultima underworld Arx fatalis Two worlds series Deus ex series
Sadly I've already played all of these. Never did finish Arx Fatalis though, might go back to it..
> Tyranny, every bit as good as Planescape Torment
That has got to be a joke.
Tyranny has MMO-style ability cooldowns that make combat a boring spam-what-is-availale fest, pretty much no enemy or encounter variety, companions which barely any development compared to those in PS:T, as well as a story that is obviously cut short of what it should have been.
Yeah the story is obviously cut short, but the originality of it just makes it have that special place in my heart that Planescape does. Disco Elysium is without a doubt deserving of the title though.
I also don't play CRPGs for the combat mostly. That's why the old Infinity Engine games were a lot of fun, it was about cheesing through the game in funny ways while enjoying an amazing story.
hm isn't there a ton of different single player FPS out that are fairly creative? Like Deathloop recently, MW2 single player campaign was pretty good.
It's the innovation in multiplayer FPS that's gone pretty much short of biannual efforts from AAA (Battlefield, CoD) and 1-2 niche attempts from indies (Hell Let Loose was good, Cycle Frontier) Otherwise it's just closing the gap with freemium and premium
Well, in the last 20 years or so many times it was declared that this and that genre died out. Then they all resurfaced. Indy devs do the creative work and innovation, because AAA games are all about risk aversion and money printing.
The good news is, most of the old games still run. Unless you're married to modern graphics, there's zero reason to even bother looking at most game market places these days, unless you're really just trying to figure out how to fill up 100+ GB of disk space as fast as possible.
I almost question whether having this deal blocked may ultimately be the best for Microsoft...the game industry seems to be collapsing in on itself. The one big thing I'd argue with myself on there would be a lot of the IP and its ability to be applied to non-gaming "metaverse" applications. Games aren't getting any better, and often, aren't as good as what we had 10 years ago, but I can't argue that the graphics are improving significantly, even if it doesn't matter to me in the slightest from a gaming standpoint.
Though, I probably underestimate the never ending stream of children who are always making fun of each other for not having the latest shiniest skin or emote in whatever "Free" game they happen to be playing these days.
So can we as stakeholders honestly think when we're on Diablo 22 in 2039 that we can expect this kind of money making continue? Look at what Activision does. Look at how Fortnite is eating Call of Duty and Overwatch's lunch. Software companies are expected to revolutionize and innovate not 'evolutionize' and rehash.
Was that $300M number ever confirmed by Blizzard/Activation? Your article cites mobilegamer.biz which cites Appmagic - those third party estimates are never going to be fully accurate and could be wildly off.
Anecdotally, I played the game briefly at launch and it died in terms of player numbers very very quickly.
I believe that ship has sailed and the culture has changed. Simply removing Activision's influence won't put things back the way they were. Perhaps bringing back some of the original leaders might.
> and only very recently have things looked somewhat brighter for them
Haven't been following recently. What have made the things to look brighter? It's really hard to see these things as a non-player these days because of all the negativity surrounding the company. Can't say I don't see why it is that way, though.
I don't understand how this is any way monopolistic. There's an enormous amount of competition in the gaming space. If anything, this just makes Microsoft into more of a conglomerate: something we should be encouraging and is good for a society!
> don't understand how this is any way monopolistic
It's oligopolistic, you have a virtually integrated behemoth across multiple sectors that is too big to fail, which is not good for competition and thus for consumers.
> If anything, this just makes Microsoft into more of a conglomerate: something we should be encouraging and is good for a society!
Is this sarcasm I'm missing? There's nothing wrong with conglomerates, but enormous vertically integrated with exclusivity ones aren't good for society.
What market does Microsoft operate in where there aren’t strong competitors? Google docs, AWS, PlayStation and Nintendo, Zoom, Chromebooks, Postgres/Oracle, Splunk/McAfee. If Microsoft exited any of those markets the competition would soak up the market share and keep right on going.
Doesn’t sound too-big-to-fail to me. Big on it’s own isn’t necessarily bad.
The only reason the majority of Microsoft's product still exist is the company behind them. E.g. Azure, Microsoft Teams are objectively extremely poor products with tons of drawbacks compared to any of their competitors, and would never survive on their own - their only "advantage" is that they come from a known brand enterprises already have relationships with, so it's "easy". So legitimate competitors lose market share to a poor cross-subsidised product propped up by Microsoft's cash. This is not good for the competition nor the consumers (be they business or consumer).
Yeah, I wish MS could buy Blizzard from Activision rather than acquiring both of them. But I suspect they're mostly doing it to get Call of Duty so that wouldn't really work.
> I just hope Blizzard can one day be completely divorced from Activision.
What for? Blizzard's a shell of its former glory and hadn't done much of note recently (even if it's still making money). The way things are, within Activision, Microsoft or on its own, I don't really see Blizzard making anything on the level of their best games in the future.
From my pov blizzard was already draining LONG before activision. The success of WoW killed their creativity and standards as they could just focus on recycled cliche on rails content and make loads of cash.
That said, even if it's activision, and even if you can can somehow separate them, the talent that made blizzard blizzard (whatever era of it you enjoyed) is likely long gone.
The fact that they repolished D2 into a game absolutely worth playing today on modern hardware, gorgeously really shows how good he was. And tbf, how good the graphics team is. D2R is a wonderful game, and the fact that the same old (but great) engine is actually still running is kinda incredible.
I wish OW2 was a gem like that. A friend and I have over 1k hours each into OW1.
Just wait when the price for "fixing" it will be having all their titles either Xbox/Windows only, or more expensive and/or with lesser features, addons, DLC, updates etc. on other platforms. Monopolies suck, always and everywhere, no matter what apparent improvement they seem to bring at first.
Xbox seems to do just fine getting people to buy Game Pass over offering games at full price. That changes the status quo of how games are bought and consumed enough that they really don't have to change the prior model of $70 entry fee + DLC that Sony is still using to entice anyone to switch who doesn't really want to play Sony exclusives.
Yes - Sony are the ones to hold on to exclusives right now. Not Microsoft.
exclusivity is the only thing i fear from this. that said, id probably give blizzard another shot down the road if they were bought by MS. the rest of the things you listed being a problem are already rampant through BlizzActivision and have turned a lot of people off to their games.
Idk, I look at how Microsoft handled the Bubgie -> 343 transition, and how they let that get away from them, and I'm skeptical they have what it takes to turn around a studio that has management issues.
I understand the feeling but I'm not sure Microsoft would actually fix anything. Microsoft hasn't fixed any of the problems that Bethesda had pre-acquisition. Nothing has improved for employees; the only difference is that their games aren't released on Sony platforms anymore.
Nokia was not doing so hot before Microsoft bought them.
Unless you're talking about their Windows Phone exclusivity deal before that which kneecapped them when they could have been making Android devices all those years and might have been competition in the Android space to this day.
I don't understand why game developers should be publically traded companies. You have a creative vision, you raise or borrow money to build it, you build a game, you sell it to pay off your loans and fund your next creative vision--it should be that simple.
The last thing you want is the public to start having control and financial interest in your creative vision. That gives us bullshit like loot boxes, NFTs, etc.
Hyper real AAA games maybe, but some of the biggest and most money making games like Minecraft were private creations of a person or small team. Minecraft by all accounts has gotten much worse and less popular after Microsoft bought it--people still prefer the old java version vs. newer Microsoft developed editions.
AAA is generally a budgetary designation. Minecraft was built as an indie game, then bought by a massive studio. It doesn't become AAA because of who owns it.
I'm not sure how much money they made, but off the top of my head, Factorio, Stardew Valley, and Terraria were all indie dev games that became hugely popular. And I suspect that most indie titles with any popularity make money for their creators, even if they aren't minting billionaires the way Minecraft did.
Yes, well, the fact is that only a teeny tiny fraction of indie games gets even the remote possibility of a glimmer of a hope of achieving something even closely resembling any kind of popularity. The vast majority of game releases on Steam just sell maybe a few 100 copies. That's it. These games just don't get seen. The market is too flooded with releases for any conceivable storefront to display that catalog fairly.
Minecraft was like 10 years old when it was purchased. It’a remarkable it’s still actively played at all. Most games would have died off and had a sequel released in that time.
I don't know if that's true from a business perspective. I suspect that twice as many people (ie customers) use Minecraft across all the platform ports now than did before the acquisition, despite what the oldtimers have to say about Bedrock Edition.
The China edition launched in 2017. It has 500 million users as of Oct 2021. It's based on Bedrock Edition, not Java. This is 100% a Microsoft scaling thing.
That applies to most products I can think of. I suppose the simple answer is that if you want to go mainstream with _anything_ B2C, you need to invest a ridiculous amount of money into marketing. To get that kind of money to play with, I don't think there's much of an alternative to the stock market and VCs, is there? There's a few exceptions I can think of, but not many.
As much as I enjoy indie games, I do think they've contributed heavily to the incredibly oversaturated market we see right now. It's downright impossible to find actually good mobile games for example without investing hours of research.
I mean...this generalizes to a huge problem with our country's corporate culture over the last several decades.
While there have always been people primarily motivated by profit, it at least feels like, in previous times, there was always the sense that the purpose of a business was to provide a product or service, and the profit was their reward for doing that well.
More recently, it feels much more like the purpose of a business is to make as much money as humanly possible, and whatever product or service they provide is just a necessary evil to make that happen.
Personally, I believe this can, as you suggest, be laid at the feet of Wall Street, and the insatiable drive for more profit, more growth, faster growth, more more more. How we get rid of it...is a harder problem.
That model works until you have one mediocre or poor selling game, then you’re out of business. The security added by investors providing money beyond the immediate 1-2 game horizon gets you out of this cycle a bit. Of course it brings other problems with it related to game quality and decision making processes designed to satisfy shareholders instead of the audience, all of which is to say there are significant trade offs with either choice.
While I don't think centralization of media is a good thing, the anti-competitive argument doesn't make sense given the amount of viable competition. Microsoft is probably in 3rd place in console sales, lower if you include PC and define Steam as a separate platform.
If the merger were completed, it would certainly change things, but it wouldn't be any guarantee of Microsoft's dominance, or even a first place finish. So to block the acquisition based on something that might happen seems like a clear case of regulatory overreach.
I agree. Companies like MSFT are crucial so we should allow certain degree of "monopoly" (they are more like software infrastructure). But gaming companies are not essential.
I am not surprised. The new US administration woke up the regulators from their year if not decade long nap. Facebook buying that VR company blocked, Penguin Simon&Schuster merger blocked, and now this. You can't have a market economy without competition.
At least 10. But even 10 years ago, they were in a lower-appetite state for antitrust enforcement. I think we could say that the appetite got lower around 2000ish, right?
No, the antitrust case turned slightly on appeal (due to Microsoft being able to point at the judge giving interviews about the case on TV /during/ the case), removing the breakup order and enabling them to settle with a Consent Decree. Note that it did not invalidate the findings of fact.
Hm, my recollection may be wrong here, but I think that the transition from the Clinton to the Bush administration changed how the DoJ approached the case and allowed the settlement to happen. It was my impression at the time that the Clinton administration would rather have continued in court at that point.
I don't have an issue with this per se, but Sony, the biggest player in this space, has been gobbling up studios for years. Sony has by far the strongest set of 1st party studios, and this deal wouldn't change that.
The lack of consistent enforcement of these laws really makes this a mess. And, while CoD is a mega-seller, it is hardly unique, has been declining in quality (and was never top tier), and it is weird to assume it will be a huge phenomenon forever.
Sony hasn't bought anything on this scale (and the scale of Bethesda) though.
Microsoft have also bought plenty of smaller studios without getting into much trouble.
I personally am glad that they seem to react before it's too late for a chance. The gaming market still have a fairly healthy amount of competition. If 5 years down the road MS had managed to suffocate Sony, then it would be too late to react.
Yup. Microsoft continuing to make purchases like this is how we end up with them being the Disney of gaming.
A giant backlog of great stuff that was made by smaller studios placing their bets on a project they think is good and has passion behind it, and a bunch of perfectly mediocre, forgettable new stuff with logos of IPs we used to love, the product of numbers crunched from focus group testing that couldn't possibly offend anyone for any reason.
>Sony hasn't bought anything on this scale (and the scale of Bethesda) though.
Yeah. The biggest studio acquisition that Sony has done in the last decade was Bungie, that employs about 820 people. The next biggest would be Insomniac Games with over 400 employees?
Meanwhile Activision-Blizzard had closer to 10,000 employees, and Zenimax had >2000 employees.
Also Microsoft offered to make Call of Duty available on PlayStation for the next 10 years, which is unprecedented. I think that kind of takes the wind right out of Sony's whining. It bothers me that Sony does worse monopolistic things, like blocking cross-play, and then goes crying to the law to prevent Microsoft getting a leg up. I mean it's totally expected, typical big business stuff, but it's hypocritical as fuck.
> Also Microsoft offered to make Call of Duty available on PlayStation for the next 10 years, which is unprecedented.
So what? That was obviously just a move to try and prevent the FTC from doing exactly this, not out of the goodness of their hearts. Great, 10 years of 1 series continuing to be cross-platform, and then you blink and 10 years is up and Microsoft has bought the entire gaming space and Sony dies a slow death because they didn't have infinite money like Microsoft. Or Microsoft buys them too!
Here's your 12 new plates of gray goo to choose from, straight out of the Microsoft games factory. Enjoy.
And Sony is what? They're worse. They're just trying to get the FTC to do their dirty work for them.
The thing about games, if they're gray goo, you don't buy them. There's lot's to choose from. Games are a meritocracy, they live or die on their own merits, regardless of which company produces them. If Microsoft turns them to gray goo, they only hurt themselves.
The AB acquisition wouldn't even budge the needle. The gaming industry is huge and none of AB's IP is big enough to be considered anything close to monopolistic. So they'd get CoD and WoW and a handful of dead franchises. What are the most sold and the most popular games on consoles and PC in the past year?
Honestly, blocking this acquisition is a green light for Sony to continue buying up companies and not having to compete by, say, making their own AAA shooter again. I'm not sure how this makes us better off.
Don't mistake critical acclaim for sales volume and scale. The balance sheet doesn't care about how unique and good a game is.
Sony's first party game studio segment of their business is not bigger than Activision-Blizzard.
Looking at Q4 2021, around 20% of Sony's game unit sales were first party titles. It seems to vary between 10-20% depending on the quarter.
Total game sales accounted for $2.5 billion in revenue, so we can assume that about $500 million of that revenue is from Sony's own published titles.
We could be generous and assume that Sony games on average sell for higher than the typical game, you could bump that number up to something like $700 million.
Now let's look at Activision-Blizzard: In Q4 of 2021, their revenue was $2.1 billion, so they're bringing in up to 4x more revenue from game sales than Sony's revenue from their self-published titles.
Call of Duty alone brought in in $1 billion of revenue for 2021, so the Call of Duty business is about half the size of Sony's entire game development business.
Sony's game sales including the cut they take from third party developers on their platform barely exceeds Activision-Blizzard's revenue.
Microsoft 10y deal for SOny is fair. Who knows if people will want to continue to play CoD in 2034. In the meanwhile, you have world 3rd largest company pouring resources into a great company, possibly increasing the headcount (since the costs are negligible compared to Microsoft size). You also have the harassement issues that Microsoft can address.
Also, the counterfactual can very much be one where ABK as an independent public company makes a deal to make CoD a Playstation exclusive. In the acquisition scenario, anyone will be able to play (including Nintendo users)
Until the regulators stop putting pressure on Microsoft, then they’ll start clawing back franchises and making those games Xbox exclusives. Having them on (much more popular) competitor consoles is good for them in the short term because it grows the audience/value of the IP. So when they do finally become exclusive, it will force more fans to switch.
From the OP:
> In a complaint issued today, the FTC pointed to Microsoft’s record of acquiring and using valuable gaming content to suppress competition from rival consoles, including its acquisition of ZeniMax, parent company of Bethesda Softworks (a well-known game developer). Microsoft decided to make several of Bethesda's titles including Starfield and Redfall Microsoft exclusives despite assurances it had given to European antitrust authorities that it had no incentive to withhold games from rival consoles.
So it seems the FTC is catching on to what a lot of the tech industry has known for decades: never trust Microsoft
Clearly, FTC, doesn't take Nintendo seriously as potential competition for Sony and Microsoft.
Maybe they do this to try to get support from Microsoft regarding the Apple and Google App Store. Anyways some what expected but still disappointing. Feels like FTC could fooled by Sony in my opinion.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 258 ms ] thread- stock value down considerably
- shareholders just lost their only chance at a decent buyout
- just finished worst media cycle in recent history
What's left for Activision Blizzard? What can they do with a company this gutted?
Edit: This is a sincere question, I ask it as someone who enjoyed Diablo, Overwatch and Hearthstone. Where do they go from here?
The problem is that it's not enough money for the greedy owners behind the scenes who have nothing to do with the games themselves. Think the hedge fund owners, the banks, the note owners, etc. They want increasing amounts of money such that there's no money left to sustain the teams making the games.
A pure case of greed.
Blizzard itself can most likely stand on its own.
Shed the FIFA license (fifa wants more and more licensing fees every year) - and spin Activision sports out as its own entity/product line.
The successful products are fully capable of sustaining their own production & staff, without having to feed the corporate coffers of a conglomerate that only wants increasing profits without any regard to the products and teams themselves.
Everyone at the company wins except for the overlords who lorded over the profits and continued on the path of consolidation for the only reason of lining their own pockets.
Amazing IP! The loud minority hates every new game/expansion with a passion everything, but the majority of people I talked to enjoy playing overwatch 2, enjoy the new wow expansion, and most importantly we'd all (begrudgingly) buy any new warcraft/starcraft/diablo/overwatch game.
That being said, I love the game because I lived Overwatch 1.
Anyways my quote is "enjoy playing", and sounds like we both fall into that category. The game engine and polish with the original is often overlooked IMO.
> “Microsoft has already shown that it can and will withhold content from its gaming rivals,” said Holly Vedova, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition. “Today we seek to stop Microsoft from gaining control over a leading independent game studio and using it to harm competition in multiple dynamic and fast-growing gaming markets.”
Based on the FTC's statement that reads to me, a layman, like they're trying to extract a commitment from Microsoft to publish future games on all platforms.
I don't personally think the FTC is going for a consent decree here though, Lina Khan is about antitrust, I think they are trying to block mergers as a matter of business.
Also if not Microsoft then a chinese corp will buy Blizz, for example Tencent. But I guess that would be okay
What has Disney bought up during the current administration?
This move away from the consumer harm standard is recent and the new FTC chair is committed to making sure we go back to the old days of Anti-Trust.
> The House Energy and Commerce Committee penned a letter to Michael Rapino Tuesday asking the executive to clarify ...
> ... Ticketmaster could be slapped with fines ...
This has zero teeth and won't change a single thing. It's virtue signalling at best.
Let's not pretend that unethical stealing is the only option.
If a hundred billion aliens in another galaxy watched a pirated movie, nobody would even know. If the aliens came down to Earth and took all our water, we'd all die.
Another option would be to purchase a VPN to route through a country where it is playable. But if you had to choose between the 2 options of pirating or paying more money to a different "shady" activity... I feel like the choice is pretty clear.
Both are piracy, but the latter holds the stigmatism, and the former is openly advertised by podcasters and youtubers everywhere.
People in general don't want to pirate, but they will if it's the best option (just look at the often-cited example of Steam). That's the only thing keeping publishers in check. Without it, I'm sure prices for content would be much higher than they are right now.
Should you be able to attend an event without a ticket, just because that venue has a "monopoly" on that evening's entertainment? You're not reducing the enjoyment of others, nor are you decreasing the artist's revenue.
This isn't an accurate analogy because the OP has no option to enter the venue at all, even if they want to pay.
> no one has a right to experience a specific piece of creative content
The whole motive behind copyright is that society is entitled to culture. By granting artists a time-limited monopoly, they can be incentivized to create and release more and more content, which makes society's culture richer and more widely available to everyone.
So I'd argue that the status quo OP describes is contrary to the actual objective of copyright itself.
Are you suggesting that if i couldn't get a ticket to a concert i want to see, I am entitled to some kind of compensation?
That wasn't my main argument however. Please read it below in my original response.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use?wprov=sfla1
>commentary, search engines, criticism, parody, news reporting, research, and scholarship.
Yeah, there is plenty of "content" to watch. The problem is that there tends to be content people want to watch, because word has gotten out that it is high quality, or (in this case) a trailer/ad looked appealing, and having it locked up on zero, maybe one, platforms doesn't really satisfy someone?
Pre-orders on Steam turned into Epic exclusive caused an uproar. It came out on Steam a year later and I waited another year after that, then waited for a sale.
And got a patched, polished game with mods - fun for co-op with friends.
I don't think my "protest delayed" purchase 2+ years later made an impact on them. But it sated me.
https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...
Sounds like the FTC does not trust Microsoft’s assurances.
This has not been my experience when playing any game that uses the UWP / Windows store API. I must've sunk 20+ hours into trying to get Forza 7 to start. It would launch and play fine maybe 1/20 times, and then exit to desktop with no error after about 20 minutes of play.
The other 19/20 times it wouldn't start, and the support online was abysmal. Suggestions include rebooting your machine, reinstalling the game (which was an 80GB download), reinstalling the GPU drivers, and I even got desperate enough to attempt a technique that was parroted on many forums as a fix, which is to install and immediately remove a completely unrelated Windows app store game. This worked a few times and then stopped working, or maybe it was just a coincidence. I spent a few hours trying to get my money back from MS and gave up on that too.
I miss the days when you could just run a .exe to start a game - if this is the future of gaming on Windows, then gaming on Linux could actually be a viable competitor.
I would only use pc for some RTS games (like AoE, civ, and things along those lines) which don't need such huge compute requirements.
It is unsolicited advice but I'd suggest that Microsoft get the Windows store working right before it spends billions on a source of games for it that as it is people won't be able to play. (... for that matter, am I the only one who sees links to unwholesome "Youtube shorts" on the Youtube home page that don't actually play? I have the problem both on Windows/Firefox and my iPad)
The usual cause for something like this is that management is incentivizing for something that isn't quality. Velocity is the normal one that gets people, but there are a few others that occasionally get people (number of open tickets/lack of outrage on social media/etc).
It is, of course, possible that the team is incompetent, but that's usually an easier problem to fix, and if the team has had normal turnover, the odds of them having consistently incompetent ICs for years on end is pretty low.
I support this because MS is already huge (Windows, Office, Xbox) and Activision/Blizzard is huge.
There is already way too much centralization. EA owns too much. Honestly there may be some Sony shouldn’t have been allowed to acquire (I don’t keep track on either side).
So MS + Activision is just too centralized for me. If the argument is “we need this to compete with EA” then we should break up EA.
I like to describe them as a many-headed beast; Some are benevolent, others less so.
Open sourcing a lot of stuff has been amazing for the MS ecosystem. But then they pull the Hot Reload move.
Two steps forward, a half step back, seems like.
Some people have been floating around the idea that Sony could respond by acquiring Square Enix. Not sure if that is actually fiancially viable, but I would much prefer Sony and Microsoft acquire smaller studios (think Playground Games, Bluepoint Games) and leave bigger players like Activision and Square Enix alone.
But I don’t like just flat out consolidation of already large companies. I don’t see a benefit (to gamers) in that. Just investors/business people.
I do. I've had Microsoft account hacked with no way of recovering it despite still owning the email associated with it. I continuously get email notifications from Microsoft stating that there's suspicious activity on the account but recovery is effectively impossible.
I won't buy anything at all that requires a Microsoft account to use.
1. Opened a MSN.net account in early 00's. Fake name/birthday provided as is the norm for the day and only email validation was required at the time.
2. Opened a Skype account in early 00's. Fake name/birthday information provided as is the norm for the day and only email validation was required at the time.
3. Microsoft merged Skype and MSN.net
4. Bought a Surface Pro in early 10's and that required a Microsoft account. Hated it and returned it, but now there's a CC and name associated with the account.
5. Account was hacked in mid 10's. Lost access.
6. Recovery workflow now involves "verifying" questions and answers that were never a part of the sign-up workflow, and secondary workflow involves "verifying" fake name/birthday information that's long since forgotten, or verifying purchases and prices and CC numbers (which have since changed), or verification of email.
7. Verification of email isn't enough because it's not a second factor. Want more verification.
8. MS phone support refuses to help, and brick & mortar staff have no capability to recover accounts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_video_game_console_genera...
To over-simplify, I foresee two possible outcomes.
1. The merge makes AB worse. That's fine because while I somewhat enjoy their games, they aren't doing anything ground-breaking and their existing catalog of games is good enough for me to keep playing if I ever get the urge for something they've made. And if they fold in a flaming wreckage of nonsense, that's fine, because again, their existing catalog of games is fine as is, and I wouldn't greatly miss future entries.
2. The merge makes AB better. Great! Maybe some of their existing IPs are improved beyond simple incremental improves and maybe even some new IPs that are worth playing come about. I see this is a win for everyone.
I do see the side of "MS has enough money to bully companies like Sony", but the thing is, Sony is still the clear leader in the console gaming space. This means any concession that MS gives out end up feeling like handouts to the market leader, which just feels strange to me.
But at the end of the day, if that means agreements to release titles like Call of Duty on Playstation (is anyone really concerned whether they come out on Nintendo platforms?) that's fine by me as well.
I don't find this to be the case at all. SONY is market leader in consoles because they've been doing a better job. Microsoft cross-funding their way into a monopoly wouldn't make MS decision making any better, would it?
As an extreme example: Imagine MS buying out all major game studios in 2013 (they certainly have had the money to do it). You -- as the consumer -- would've either been stuck with a console that made every wrong decision, but has every game on it. Or a console made with better decisions but with no games. How is preventing this a handout to the market leader?
I just don't see this merger moving the needle much on the competition between the two companies.
I just don't understand how this merger would be even entertained by the FCC. The only reason MS is lagging behind Sony is because of their own incompetence (outside of Japan). Allowing this much of a cross funding to offset incompetence shouldn't event be on the table.
It's so disappointing to me that Activision kept Blizzard as part of the name during the merger. Decision makers at Blizzard were replaced with decision makers who Activision liked and now the company is just Activision with Blizzard's IP.
Everyone who made the Blizzard name worth paying attention to was either gone or pushed into a different role by the time Activision ruined their name, but people still say things like "Blizzard sucks" instead of "Activision sucks" (hell, even "Activision Blizzard sucks" would feel better).
I'm don't even think that it's wrong to say "Blizzard sucks"; it just sucks that it's true.
There's already way, way, way too much consolidation in industry today (not just "the games industry"; all of industry). What we need to be doing is breaking up many of these megacorporations, and then reversing the burden of proof for mergers & acquisitions: not "we'll stop this if it's proven that it would be harmful," but "we won't allow this unless it's proven to be beneficial", with a fairly high bar.
It just seems so absurd to me to see so many people who trumpet the power of the "free market", but then advocate for this kind of hyper-consolidated situation as if it's remotely like a "free market". Yes, sure, I can buy my $thing from Oppressive Megacorp A, B, or C, all of whom have a huge interest in maintaining the status quo and avoiding meaningful competition.
There are on the order of 10 video game companies with over a billion usd in revenue. There are 3 distinct console manufacturers (4 if you count the steam deck, 5 if you include PCs). Then there’s the mobile gaming market, which has all the big players plus a bunch of others.
Duopoly’s and small markets goodness or badness is irrelevant in this situation.
That said…I agree with you, though I doubt MS would help.
https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/overwatch-2-topped-...
https://www.pcgamer.com/diablo-immortal-hits-30-million-play...
https://www.gamespot.com/amp-articles/wow-classics-success-s...
everyone with multiple accounts will have logged in on each at least once to get the three new heroes
this is over forever now
Sincerely hope the deal falls through and the company goes bankrupt.
I actually only (re-)learned of the game recently (I recall its original announcement), but not enough to know anything more about it and I have been meaning to go back to it and check it out. Do you have a short version of what lends you that opinion?
Another way to put it is that for me it worked while Samwise contributed but was in check.
Edit: Now I'm not blaming them, from a business perspective they had to follow the shifting zeitgeist and it obviously worked, old school D&D/Warhammer/Heavy Metal/... were totally uncool at the time especially for teenage millennials.
That game exists, and it's called Path of Exile. It is also the poster child for why most of D2 aged really, really, really poorly.
Another take on that same concept is called Last Epoch.
Double the price for minimal fixes? They didn't even bother including fixes for known issues which known workarounds available on the vault like e.g. HotU companions sometimes not using most of their abilites because the AI selects the mount ability as the best available one.
Really, these old games should just be released to the community to maintain them like iD used to do. And if someone like Beamdog wants to profit off such maintenance then they better be able to do so without taking the original down from sale because they know they can't actually compete with vanilla + community patches.
https://playstormgate.com/
Sometimes it's not that they lost the touch or that they sold themselves. It's just that we're not teenagers anymore, in an old internet cafe playing on LAN with our friends. Even if a similar game is coming back, the entire moment with all its context is not.
Still, I'm happy to see they're still alive and faithful to their roots.
Obsidian has been arguably less so, but grounded and the outer worlds have both been unique feeling and creative titles in my eyes.
Troika? Obsidian?
Even revenue for the developer, or in enjoyment for the user? Because Torchlight (ex-Diablo-II ICs) was a humdinger of a D-II sequel in terms of gameplay, but sales? Not so much.
This makes me think that the biggest value that the studio brings to the table for revenue is brand recognition.
IOW, it doesn't matter how good the game is, brand recognition gets you over the line sometimes.
Overwatch was the first Blizzard game that I liked less and less the more they patched it.
Overwatch is all about swapping heroes during the game
Blizzard even incentivised swapping heroes more in Overwatch 2 (30% ult charge retained, vs. 0 in Overwatch 1)
I tried out Overwatch 2, despite all the negative press it is fun and sweaty. I had plenty of fun despite not playing as Kiriko and I'm sure I could easily derive 10s if not 100s of hours before feeling a need to unlock Kiriko.
If a game is taking so much of your time and you have a job, why isn't it ok to just pay a bit to unlock a hero?
I'd take these kinds of monetisation over destiny 2 which didn't even have p2w or clash royale (before season pass)
It's just odd to think that a certain part of the meta is paywalled. It really messes with the sense of competitive integrity.
Normally I'd be fine with a battlepass, but I refuse to pay activision any money out of principle.
I wonder if that's why the "Real Money Auction House" from Diablo 3 existed.
"Gamers" might believe this but do the stakeholders actually believe that? The company is still printing money. [1]
[1] https://gamerant.com/diablo-immortal-made-300-million-dollar....
To put things into perspective - in its heyday - WoW was half as profitable as Tesla is now...
It's hard to catch lightning in a bottle twice.
They made WoW. It was insanely profitable. Their valuation soared. They sold. They declined.
It's hard to say if its reversion to the mean or the Activision acquisition - but it's hard to argue Blizzard hasn't declined by every metric.
Considering the cost to create and amount of reputation damage it caused, YES. Diablo immortal was a massive failure.
According to the article they generated roughly the same amount of revenue in 4 months as the previous record breaking game did in an entire year. I wish I had that kind of reputation damage.
That is a good point, the amount of raid shadow legends adverts on the internet have become a meme at this point. I haven't seen any ads for Immortals here in the US and the financial report doesn't break down marketing spend by property.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_farming#History
That’s the calculation you need to look at, not earnings as if expenses prior to release was 0$.
According to the article I linked Immortal generated roughly the same amount of revenue in 4 months as Raid Shadow Legends (the previous record holder) did in their best year. That is a domination of that gaming niche.
Do you have a source on this $7B a year profit figure? I've tried to find it and can't find anything even close to $7B revenue let alone profit going back to 1994.
Also fyi, WoW was originally released in 2004, not 1994.
[1] https://www.quora.com/How-much-revenue-does-World-of-Warcraf...
The paid stuff was a monetization tactic after the decline.
So many fun franchises are basically dead because they aren't nearly as profitable as a freemium game and selling digital garbage. Single player FPS is basically dead. RTSes are also effectively dead. The only place you'll find such things is from indy devs and they don't have anywhere near the budget to make something as good as what we used to get :(.
There could always be a sc3 or aoe18 (or whatever). There are infinite areas to explore.
People are largely still completely satisfied with what they have now.
That being said AoE2 is an awesome game :)
Different strokes for different folks.
The problem occurs when the game has been out long enough that all the active players are leagues ahead of a new player; either they wait forever for a match or get steamrolled.
The main problem is that it's a 12 year-old game, that's been largely abandoned by the developer. The other main problem is that unlike a skill-based MOBA, you can't blame anyone else for your losses. The third main problem is that the game is incredibly stressful, demands 100% of your attention, and the smallest mistake can lose the game for you.
my brother in Christ, you got it backwards - being abandoned is the biggest blessing an old Blizzard game can receive.
They'd probably add commander level and equipable commander items which grant buffs to your units. You'd have a chance of getting one item each time you win a pvp fight and you can increase the quality/rarity of the drop by using cash shop items. Oh, and the rare items might require a higher commander level... Obviously you'd also be able to buy temporary buffs to your XP gain, so you can equip them sooner.
They could maybe even focus more on group pvp (i.e. 4vs4) so the whales can carry scrubs to wins. That would give them a chance of loot even if they're just there to be farmed and will make them properly fawn over the mighty whales that let them gain their pointless upgrades.
Perfect whale farm.
Those first 50 games were crazy because you were matched randomly with other new and established players, so sometimes you would play someone really good who would steamroll you in the first 5 minutes, and sometimes you got someone who had at most played the scripted campaigns against the AI and thought they could sit there for the first 30 minutes slowly building up an army.
It was actually pretty fun not knowing which way it would go, and whenever we matched with newbies my partner and I got to experiment with a bunch of different strategies that would never work in a real game.
This right here is my fundamental problem with multiplayer RTS games. The fun I get out of them is in the slow burn long buildup, but other players always find ways to optimize the early game so they win fast and never actually get to the fun part where everyone has massive bases lobbing nukes at eachother. The fun way to play is not the optimal way to play.
It's now been about 10 years since I've even bothered trying an RTS online.
My partner and I had way more fun in those early games when we could stretch it out to 30-60 minutes sometimes. Once you're playing against ranked people who are there to win it's just a mad rush to the first or second tech tier.
It was pretty much the same as SC2, they just never told you in the UI. e.g. Dragoons do half damage to mutalisks. Yamato cannons don’t kill zealots.
The way to beat players who play strong openers is to play a strong opener yourself, but not necessarily all-in aggressive. If you want to get to the late game you enjoy you must get better at the early game. Harass the other guy early, scout their build, make sure you're building counters to what the other player is playing. Defend well. Deny their economy here and there. Inevitably crush them with nukes and capital ships after 30 minutes of solid fundamentals.
(Starcraft is still a lot of fun and I'd encourage you to get back in to RTS playing)
I think maybe what you meant to say was "... and expect to _win_"
Plenty of people have fun turtling (:
This is one thing I liked about Total Annihilation — defense tech was relatively strong, so some amount of turtling and racing to get high tech artillery (eg) was a viable approach.
I think a larger issue is that there's like 3-5 games to get ranked and then a bit more to get really ranked properly. And by SC2 design the early game is resource constrained so decisions are important and even with the right decisions execution is hard.
Watch a few games on Youtube.
It was a fairly popular variant of the game too, never had trouble finding matches
They're less niche and more fun to watch as e-sports for the casual player.
RTS streams are downright boring if you're not actively competing at ranked matches.
MOBAs seem super confusing if you dont play. Its 30 minutes of nothing happening, and then like 15 seconds of people getting really excited and then the game is over.
I disagree. A lot of Korean viewers never even touched the ranked online multiplayer when BW was mainstream esports. Heck even my dad watched it.
The fun of RTSes is the learning curve, but throw in a bunch of "you can buy a special unit for $10" and all the sudden the game balancing is destroyed. That leaves you with inconsequential things like avatar skins to sell and very few people would buy those.
Couple that with the fact that new players aren't likely to spend hours online playing the game (because they get destroyed) and you've got a major problem.
For me, the fun of RTSes was in single player games and lan parties.
Big difference between the cosmetics for an FPS and RTS. There aren't a lot of cosmetic options you could come up in an RTS.
I remember the transition. I kinda hated it, to be honest. Not because of the drops (they were introducing hats and loot well before this) but because the influx of players were...low quality
Elden Ring and the Souls games are difficult and even to a point intentionally alienating but have had massive success including in the mainstream.
I don't know what it is but I feel there's something else going on with the rapid decline of RTS besides the difficulty.
Other competitive games like CS/Valorant gives you downtime in between rounds and when you die. Similarly with MOBAs, travel time in between your base and lane, when you die. Even fighting games, when you get a hit in, it's back to muscle memory for your bread and butter combo, and rounds are much shorter.
I realized I wrote a mistake: I did play a handful of MP matches of World in Conflict after finishing the (very enjoyable) single-player campaign. It was fun, but not as much as the single player portion; and I never invested enough time for it to be fun.
I could see something like SC2 being fun with 2-3 people playing 1 player's role at a time. 1 person on the econ, 2 people on the army. Or much better AI that you can override selectively, so if you want to handle the fighting you can, or if you want to handke the econ you can.
This also describes chess, yet that has a significant online presence.
Luckily, most of the time you just to have wait about a year to get them on PC, often for a cheaper price too.
Also single player FPS games still exist, just not standalone as they used to.
You can see this well in comparing Crysis 1 with 2 & 3.
This is not just about gamepad console => m&k PC, by the way.
But its certainly better than not having story games at all. Sony's story games are really really good, and they finally realized that releasing on PC is a win-win for everyone, more money for Sony, more games for PC, because most of the time no one wants to switch from PC to PlayStation
I also don't think RTS is dead but the category has been stale for some time. I grew up playing Age of Empires 2, and the game still has a healthy player base with regular new content being added. However compared to the turn of the century the pace of innovation has definitely slowed down.
I am not interested in 4X games.
> 4X (abbreviation of Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate) is a subgenre of strategy-based computer and board games, and include both turn-based and real-time strategy titles.
It's nothing like "pure" RTS like starcraft where everything is actually real time. Their 4X games have: speed control, pause, turns (days and months, depending on a game and action). If you remove ability make turns simulatinusly and make a single turn into a day - not much will change in gameplay other than it will take longer.
New Wolfenstein and Doom games, yearly call of duty, halo infinite, Titanfall 2, half life alyx, super hot, metro exodus, black mesa, destiny 2, deep rock galactic, the list goes on.
I can't understand folks who don't understand this concept. You are not the only opinion in this world, and the media and critics are incentivized to create drama.
Doom Eternal came out in 2020, and LoL is one of the most popular games of all time. SC2 just released a huge patch that revamped a lot of balance issues that had cropped up over the past decade...
Gaming has never been more diverse and well funded. It's wild to me that you see the huge selection you've got available to you and could possibly believe we're in anything but the best gaming era of all time right now.
The gaming industry is experiencing the same hyper-commercialization that the movie industry has experienced.
You can argue that the super hero movies of today and the remakes are "better" than older movies on the best objective metric we have (how much revenue they generate), and that we're in "the best era of film of all time" right now, but... I don't know who truly believes that, subjectively. :p It feels wild to believe that. I certainly don't, and I don't for gaming either.
Funny story: I got Doom Eternal about a year after it came out. I needed to make an account, even though I only play singleplayer. When first opening it, I got bombarded by pop-ups from a dozen DLC and update cycles, like a little history of its updates thus far. I cringed at the social media-like network integration stuff in the main menu. I play for a few days. On like the fourth day, when opening the game, this pop-up appears in-game, but it's empty. It's like some network notice, but it's broken. The pop-up is blank. There's no way to get past it. Nothing helps. The game essentially bricked itself via its own botnet bloatware (a thing an older game would never do). Apparently, it happens to console and PC users alike, and there was no solution around it. It's as if it accidentally ripped you, the user, off, in that a digital product just stopped working. (Let's not even mention the plight of future gamers trying to simulate the always-online DRM so they can play it in an emulator. Hey--at least Bethesda removed the kernel-level anticheat following backlash, allowing the game to run on Linux again!) Luckily, even though I was past the usual playtime limit, Steam gave me a full refund. :D
Also, Diablo Immortal is probably more profitable than all the previous Diablo games put together, and I'll leave it to you to decide if that's a case where profitability or even popularity maps with whatever we truly mean by "quality".
I agree, a lot of parallels can be drawn between modern AAA games and superhero movies. the quest to reach the largest market has resulted in products without much in the way of nuance or new ideas. this is kinda what you have to do if you're going to spend $250mm on a game or movie. even achieving wide appeal within a single large country isn't enough to reliably make that back; you have to make something appealing (or at least inoffensive) to most of the world.
at the same time, I think you are missing just how much the gaming market has expanded since 10-20 years ago. while very successful for their time, games like halflife are very niche by today's standards. there's no like-for-like comparison between cod:mw2 and a game from the early/mid 2000s.
if you expect AAA games in 2023 to scratch the same itch as they did back then, you will surely be disappointed. they aren't designed for the same audience. but by and large, more money is available to fund development for all sorts of games today. concepts that would have been a janky mod for some other games ~20 years ago are full-fledged titles of their own now. ymmv of course, but I find that when I lose the expectation for modern AAA-level graphics, there are tons of great new games available in recent years.
GOG still exists to avoid most single player DRM issues (some games have limited single player content that requires an internet connection) and with a better refund policy, although unfortunately they don't have good Linux support. I have an entirely offline game system and rarely have any kind of issue due to that (Zachtronics games are some of the worst since you can't see how well you did on a level without an internet connection, unless they changed that since I last tried one a few years ago). GOG has about 4500 games at this point (catalog shows a few hundred more with "hide DLC and extras" but some are miscategorized DLC), not nearly as many as Steam but still quite a few (unfortunately, some developers don't keep the GOG version up to date).
Ok, very simple example, are slot machines fun?
I think anyone can objectively look at a slot machine and say "no, that's really not fun". Yet, people spend their entire retirements on slot machines. People DIE pumping quarters into a slot machine. People wear diapers to slot machines. Slot machines are HIGHLY profitable for casinos (which is why they have them).
Fun and profit are not the same thing. Some games, such as Diablo Immortal, have realized that addicting is more profitable than fun. The entire game industry has learned that if you randomize rewards (loot boxes) you can trigger addiction without having a fun game.
> You are not the only opinion in this world
I'd look into the mirror before giving this advice. I realize that some people find gambling fun. Whatever floats your boat. But I also realize that there is such a thing as gambling addiction and it is highly profitable.
That said, I reject a definition of fun that involves how profitable something is because of the slot machine example.
If fun is anything, it's not getting a diaper rash while going broke.
i.e. if it were just electrical impulses going back and forth?
Fun cannot be discussed, or argued, because you cannot properly share that context with others, and you cannot deny the reality of their context.
But good is a property of the game itself -- it's essentially the answer to the question "how well does the game achieve the goals it chases, and how well does it choose its goals?". This is still somehow subjective, but dramatically less so -- we can actually discuss it in a manner that's sensible. To a degree, the discussion has to factor in that we have different beliefs of what those goals are, and whether those are good goals to have, but this is true of any judgement.
And when talking about whether a movie, book, game, etc is any good, no one gives a shit whether you had "fun" playing it, because that tells us nothing about whether its good. It just tells us "your" experience -- your specific relationship to the work -- more about you than it... but we're not talking about you.
But that wasn't the comment I was responding to. The comment I responded to made the positive assertion "Things are fun because they are profitable"
> what you define as fun isn't apparently what others define as such, at least when it comes to voting with their dollars.
If you want to change the argument to "fun is unknowable" I can get behind that statement. However, I think the slot machine example is a really good one to prove that fun and profit are not the same thing. Even if you want to argue that the slot machines can be fun, I think you'd have a hard time arguing that addicts to slots are all having a blast.
What's changed in the gaming industry is more focus on profit and less on fun. The gaming industry has learned is what B.F. Skinner discovered decades ago [1], how to get repeat behaviors out of someone with randomize rewards.
[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/brain-wise/201311/us...
Your whole "slot machine" example is predicated on my response being, "Well no, slot machines aren't fun." However, I do think slot machines are loads of fun! Not for me, but for the millions of people who sit there, spend very tiny sums of money (think like $5 for literally 12 hours of chill entertainment), and get to feel good about themselves while they do it.
I feel like tossing in a patch from SC2 as an indicator that it's actively being supported is a little misleading. SC2 had the opportunity to compete with LoL and Dota2 for viewership but Blizzard made a LOT of mistakes with the first expansion that alienated players and sent them to LoL, Dota2, or CSGO.
Their game design philosophy and slow patch rhythm sabotaged the momentum that the pro scene had been building (warp gate tech, infinite value units like Brood Lords and Swarm Hosts, frontloading all Terran power into Stim units, etc). They also catered the ladder experience solely for competitive players, they didn't introduce many (if any) casual-friendly modes until far too late.
Wings of Liberty was a great time, though.
But also, just not being able to play cooperatively with friends was the final death knell. SC was designed for an era where you played alone and then you played against others who played alone because there weren’t a lot of anyone playing SC or anything really.
LoL unlocked an entire demographic of kids who wanted to play with friends. A great explosion in online VC tech helped foster this and the rest is history. Gaming is now a social activity and all the top sellers right now effectively leverage this.
And I'm going to have to disagree about "not as good as we used to get". Is there any question that Zero-K/Spring (or BAR/Spring) aren't way better than Total Annihilation (ok, maybe not for the orchestral score), despite being entirely community-made ?
https://youtu.be/pHQkctGTm_A
* Disco Elysium
* Tyranny
* Shadowrun, all of them
* Pathfinder: Kingmaker
All within the last decade, and at least for Disco Elysium and Tyranny, every bit as good as Planescape Torment.
Western RPGs though.. I don't have high hopes for ES6.
Other games with those qualifications: Ultima underworld Arx fatalis Two worlds series Deus ex series
The obsidian games typically have plenty of utility spells, but not always.
Oblivion has some of that stuff too but it's definitely simplified.
Skyrim has no spell crafting at all, which means combat becomes "mash mouse button" or "sneaky arrow". Lycanthropy is pretty fun though, but also wears out. Mods definitely saved the game since they add all the crazy shit that is missing.
The trend is quite obvious though. Don't get me wrong, I'll still definitely play the shit out of ES6, I just don't feel it will reach the glory of Morrowind.
> Ultima underworld Arx fatalis Two worlds series Deus ex series
Sadly I've already played all of these. Never did finish Arx Fatalis though, might go back to it..
Especially with graphics million times faster than the devs could have imagined.
That has got to be a joke.
Tyranny has MMO-style ability cooldowns that make combat a boring spam-what-is-availale fest, pretty much no enemy or encounter variety, companions which barely any development compared to those in PS:T, as well as a story that is obviously cut short of what it should have been.
I also don't play CRPGs for the combat mostly. That's why the old Infinity Engine games were a lot of fun, it was about cheesing through the game in funny ways while enjoying an amazing story.
hm isn't there a ton of different single player FPS out that are fairly creative? Like Deathloop recently, MW2 single player campaign was pretty good.
It's the innovation in multiplayer FPS that's gone pretty much short of biannual efforts from AAA (Battlefield, CoD) and 1-2 niche attempts from indies (Hell Let Loose was good, Cycle Frontier) Otherwise it's just closing the gap with freemium and premium
HL3 just needed to merge the two storylines/timelines and give players both.
Imagine multiplayer with that!
I almost question whether having this deal blocked may ultimately be the best for Microsoft...the game industry seems to be collapsing in on itself. The one big thing I'd argue with myself on there would be a lot of the IP and its ability to be applied to non-gaming "metaverse" applications. Games aren't getting any better, and often, aren't as good as what we had 10 years ago, but I can't argue that the graphics are improving significantly, even if it doesn't matter to me in the slightest from a gaming standpoint.
Though, I probably underestimate the never ending stream of children who are always making fun of each other for not having the latest shiniest skin or emote in whatever "Free" game they happen to be playing these days.
Anecdotally, I played the game briefly at launch and it died in terms of player numbers very very quickly.
Haven't been following recently. What have made the things to look brighter? It's really hard to see these things as a non-player these days because of all the negativity surrounding the company. Can't say I don't see why it is that way, though.
It's oligopolistic, you have a virtually integrated behemoth across multiple sectors that is too big to fail, which is not good for competition and thus for consumers.
> If anything, this just makes Microsoft into more of a conglomerate: something we should be encouraging and is good for a society!
Is this sarcasm I'm missing? There's nothing wrong with conglomerates, but enormous vertically integrated with exclusivity ones aren't good for society.
Doesn’t sound too-big-to-fail to me. Big on it’s own isn’t necessarily bad.
What for? Blizzard's a shell of its former glory and hadn't done much of note recently (even if it's still making money). The way things are, within Activision, Microsoft or on its own, I don't really see Blizzard making anything on the level of their best games in the future.
That said, even if it's activision, and even if you can can somehow separate them, the talent that made blizzard blizzard (whatever era of it you enjoyed) is likely long gone.
The fact that they repolished D2 into a game absolutely worth playing today on modern hardware, gorgeously really shows how good he was. And tbf, how good the graphics team is. D2R is a wonderful game, and the fact that the same old (but great) engine is actually still running is kinda incredible.
I wish OW2 was a gem like that. A friend and I have over 1k hours each into OW1.
Yes - Sony are the ones to hold on to exclusives right now. Not Microsoft.
Unless you're talking about their Windows Phone exclusivity deal before that which kneecapped them when they could have been making Android devices all those years and might have been competition in the Android space to this day.
The argument was that Blizzard isn't doing so hot either, and that Microsoft would fix them.
The last thing you want is the public to start having control and financial interest in your creative vision. That gives us bullshit like loot boxes, NFTs, etc.
Requires a different corporate structure
As much as I enjoy indie games, I do think they've contributed heavily to the incredibly oversaturated market we see right now. It's downright impossible to find actually good mobile games for example without investing hours of research.
While there have always been people primarily motivated by profit, it at least feels like, in previous times, there was always the sense that the purpose of a business was to provide a product or service, and the profit was their reward for doing that well.
More recently, it feels much more like the purpose of a business is to make as much money as humanly possible, and whatever product or service they provide is just a necessary evil to make that happen.
Personally, I believe this can, as you suggest, be laid at the feet of Wall Street, and the insatiable drive for more profit, more growth, faster growth, more more more. How we get rid of it...is a harder problem.
Valve pioneered all 3 in games, and they're still private :shrugs:
If the merger were completed, it would certainly change things, but it wouldn't be any guarantee of Microsoft's dominance, or even a first place finish. So to block the acquisition based on something that might happen seems like a clear case of regulatory overreach.
ETA: although this is much bigger than just MSFT.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor...
The lack of consistent enforcement of these laws really makes this a mess. And, while CoD is a mega-seller, it is hardly unique, has been declining in quality (and was never top tier), and it is weird to assume it will be a huge phenomenon forever.
Microsoft have also bought plenty of smaller studios without getting into much trouble.
I personally am glad that they seem to react before it's too late for a chance. The gaming market still have a fairly healthy amount of competition. If 5 years down the road MS had managed to suffocate Sony, then it would be too late to react.
A giant backlog of great stuff that was made by smaller studios placing their bets on a project they think is good and has passion behind it, and a bunch of perfectly mediocre, forgettable new stuff with logos of IPs we used to love, the product of numbers crunched from focus group testing that couldn't possibly offend anyone for any reason.
Yeah. The biggest studio acquisition that Sony has done in the last decade was Bungie, that employs about 820 people. The next biggest would be Insomniac Games with over 400 employees?
Meanwhile Activision-Blizzard had closer to 10,000 employees, and Zenimax had >2000 employees.
The scales seem quite vastly different.
Bethesda alone as more IPs even if you don't take other ZeniMax's IPs in to consideration.
So what? That was obviously just a move to try and prevent the FTC from doing exactly this, not out of the goodness of their hearts. Great, 10 years of 1 series continuing to be cross-platform, and then you blink and 10 years is up and Microsoft has bought the entire gaming space and Sony dies a slow death because they didn't have infinite money like Microsoft. Or Microsoft buys them too!
Here's your 12 new plates of gray goo to choose from, straight out of the Microsoft games factory. Enjoy.
The thing about games, if they're gray goo, you don't buy them. There's lot's to choose from. Games are a meritocracy, they live or die on their own merits, regardless of which company produces them. If Microsoft turns them to gray goo, they only hurt themselves.
Honestly, blocking this acquisition is a green light for Sony to continue buying up companies and not having to compete by, say, making their own AAA shooter again. I'm not sure how this makes us better off.
Sony's first party game studio segment of their business is not bigger than Activision-Blizzard.
Looking at Q4 2021, around 20% of Sony's game unit sales were first party titles. It seems to vary between 10-20% depending on the quarter.
Total game sales accounted for $2.5 billion in revenue, so we can assume that about $500 million of that revenue is from Sony's own published titles.
We could be generous and assume that Sony games on average sell for higher than the typical game, you could bump that number up to something like $700 million.
Now let's look at Activision-Blizzard: In Q4 of 2021, their revenue was $2.1 billion, so they're bringing in up to 4x more revenue from game sales than Sony's revenue from their self-published titles.
Call of Duty alone brought in in $1 billion of revenue for 2021, so the Call of Duty business is about half the size of Sony's entire game development business.
Sony's game sales including the cut they take from third party developers on their platform barely exceeds Activision-Blizzard's revenue.
[1] https://gameworldobserver.com/2022/11/01/playstation-profit-...
[2] https://investor.activision.com/news-releases/news-release-d...
Also, the counterfactual can very much be one where ABK as an independent public company makes a deal to make CoD a Playstation exclusive. In the acquisition scenario, anyone will be able to play (including Nintendo users)
From the OP:
> In a complaint issued today, the FTC pointed to Microsoft’s record of acquiring and using valuable gaming content to suppress competition from rival consoles, including its acquisition of ZeniMax, parent company of Bethesda Softworks (a well-known game developer). Microsoft decided to make several of Bethesda's titles including Starfield and Redfall Microsoft exclusives despite assurances it had given to European antitrust authorities that it had no incentive to withhold games from rival consoles.
So it seems the FTC is catching on to what a lot of the tech industry has known for decades: never trust Microsoft
Maybe they do this to try to get support from Microsoft regarding the Apple and Google App Store. Anyways some what expected but still disappointing. Feels like FTC could fooled by Sony in my opinion.