I’m torn, because normally I wouldn’t want a company like microsoft to buy such a big publisher, but what Activision did to Blizzard was so bad that Microsoft would be an improvement.
Very much in the same boat. Can’t stomach their shitty policies and their garbage CEO aynmore. If MS purged these people after buying, I could finally think about going back to their products. And I don’t see that happening without MS. Even with MS it’d be only a tiny chance.
When, in the whole history of gaming, has an acquisition improved on the company they bought?
I’m not sure Microsoft could really save Blizzard at this point in time. Microsoft also does not have the greatest trackrecord of buying other game publishers. Instead of it becoming a toxic environment, it often just slowly becomes less and less of what made it unique and fun in the first place. So yeah. torn as well. I really like your take.
Microsoft might improve Blizzard and the rest of Activision, but it will be a net loss for the industry. Microsoft has too much power in the market already, and that will only grow over time as they use their power from other segments to take over more. I see it in the business world already. They basically took over the entire market for business email, then pretty much dropped their self hosting options, leaving most business with only the option of M365. Which is great, until they decided to change partner terms on a dime and increase prices and there wasn’t a damn thing we could do to stop it. Our options are either leave for Google(who’s business tools absolutely suck), or look to FOSS, which has a rather high maintenance cost. Microsoft has that industry captured, and it is almost impossible to break out of.
Right, I was actually hoping it would go through so I could potentially lift my boycott of ActiBlizz that I started during the Blitzchung incident and only solidified as more information came out about the horrible things going on at Blizzard with some of their employees. Weirdly enough, I really want to play Heroes of the Storm again.
This is exactly my take. I can’t in good conscious buy a Blizzard game right now, so I kind of wanted this to go through.
Every other part of me did not want this to go through. With how popular game pass is, and how many studios they’re buying, this is just a recipe for a bait and switch and a bad situation for gamers down the road.
Let’s hope it doesn’t happen. I don’t know why some people get excited. Monopolies are never a good thing and Microsoft is ONCE again getting too big…
Except Microsoft is in a distant third place in the gaming market - Sony has had the crown for that for years, and has actually used its market position in the past to make things worse for competitors and for gamers in general.
except we need Microsoft to get bigger to stop Sony from being a dominating monopoly.
Microsoft can do that by actually competing. Throwing money around solely to take things away from people who don’t buy their products to entrench themselves in the market is anti-competitive. Allowing that sort of thing means any behemoth can come and muscle their way into any market they want to. This is a bad future.
Throwing money around solely to take things away from people, like Sony does? So it’s fine if it’s small enough and affects less people (Xbox users)? Or the other illogical line of thought of “they’re both not okay but don’t let them do what the smaller guy who controls more of the market does”.
Microsoft is only bigger because Xbox isn’t separate, they’re not even second biggest after the purchased.
Slightly pains me to say that this is a good thing. As much as I hate what’s happened to Blizzard but especially Crash and Spyro, monopolies are only going to end up making things so much worse.
Good.
I think this is a good thing. I’m not at all a fan of activision-blizzard, but I just can’t see any benefits from microsoft buying them.
