Oh boy, can’t wait for more average but poorly managed games!
Or just windows store exclusives…
I’ll eat my fine leather hat before I use that dog shit store again.
Keep in mind that that’s extra special because I don’t own a fine leather hat, so I gotta buy one first.
That’s not so bad now gamepass is a thing, usually they’re on pc at launch
oh okay as long as it’s on pc we don’t care. cool. Honestly I have such a hard time with the video games community. for a long time I was a big supporter of the idea that a certain company shouldn’t be buying up exclusives because games should be for all.
but as soon as Microsoft started doing it, everyone has this apathetic response suddenly because “i got mine”. As soon as the shoe is on the other foot gamers show themselves real quick.
There is no way that Gamepass is going to remain a good value once it’s past trying to get new members in the introduction phase. I would give it at most 2 years before the enshitification really takes hold. It could be merely months since they are trying to look good to regulators right now.
Laws against monopolies don’t exist, anymore, eh?
3rd place in… What? I’m trying to search around to see what you’re referring to here, but I can’t find anything.
By total market cap, Microsoft already blows these companies out of the water. By just videogame divisions, Sony and Nintendo are way farther ahead because of hardware sales, but that doesn’t really make sense to include in the conversation about acquiring a publisher. I can’t find any solid numbers either way isolating publishing, other than that the top 5 in recent years seems to be Tencent, Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, and Activision/Blizzard (with EA hanging around too). Seems like any of those two merging is going to be bad for everyone other than shareholders.
Yes, third place in total gaming revenue. I agree it will be bad, but let’s not pretend this is going to shift the market in a big way, because it won’t.
Usually I am against huge mergers like this because they rarely benefit the customer, but ActiBlizzard was about as bad as it gets anyway.
Selfishly I hope maybe at least one decent RTS might come from this before everything gets enshittyfied again.
I realize though that OG Warcraft/Starcraft were not the big motivators for MS so the chance is probably slim.
You should look into Stormgate.
It’s an upcoming rts from frost giant studios which consists of some of the original blizzard team responsible for StarCraft.
I actually got a spot in the closed alpha this month.
It feels pretty good so far even though unfortunately I can’t play as much as I would like due to my job and aspects of my personal life taking a lot of time right now.
I plan on getting at least a couple more games in this weekend.
Microsoft still supports AoE2, and that game is going on 22+ years. Some of the other stuff they’ve released has been a bit hit and miss, but they at least tried to do something fresh.
I’ll take that over ActiBlizz dropping support for the SC2 pro scene for no good reason other than “profitability” any day.
Hell, maybe they can fix WoW classic while they’re at it, and say what you will about the guy but if I understand correctly even Chris Metzen is coming back.
Out of all these studios I suppose I like Microsoft’s games the most, but I still think it’s bad that the regulators didn’t shoot down this merger from the view of competitiveness.
I don’t think the gaming market is healthy when only a handful of corporations like Microsoft, Ubisoft, EA Games and SquareEnix hold what I assume to be 75% of the gaming AAA market. It restricts creativity and stifles competition and the ones paying the price are going to be us consumers.
Even worse if they go and start vendor locking games to Windows, which sucks for us Linux gamers or Xbox which sucks for Playstation gamers.
Steam Deck has put a small thorn in their OS side. It used to be ridiculous to have a Linux gaming computer, but it’s become much more viable thanks to the Deck’s existence.
Basically to say Microsoft wouldn’t be able to pull a massive move like requiring Windows subscription prices without a lot of gamers going to Linux.
How many new AAA studios could be created from scratch with this money?
