Microsoft to acquire Activision Blizzard in $67 billion deal

[Lostdragon]

On 1/21/2022 at 9:47 PM, zzip said:

It depends if MS intends to play the exclusive game or push GamePass to as many platforms as possible.   100+ million PS4s out there plus around 20 million PS5s is a lot of players to ignore.

Do they answer to shareholders? 

 

It would make no buisness sense to ignore a combined user base of over 100 million users. 

[Scotterpop]

1 hour ago, Lostdragon said:

And rehire Team Silent, please. 

This! At this point Konami doesn’t deserve all the stellar IPs that they currently own, especially Silent Hill. The Silent Hills and PT fiasco really shed some light on the current mindset of this company. And what good is Metal Gear without Hideo Kojima? I swear, they seem to be doing everything possible to piss off the fans of these great games. They’ve really shown themselves to be terrible stewards of these franchises so I would welcome any kind of ownership change, be it from Microsoft or practically anyone else, really. A buyout is probably the only thing that’s going to release these IPs from languishing in creative neglect. If they want to keep focusing on Pachinko machines and cell phone apps then they have no business being a games publisher.  Silent Hills looked soooo great and had some incredible talent behind it. So damned frustrating…

 

Konami:

 

[Lostdragon]

7 minutes ago, Scotterpop said:

This! At this point Konami doesn’t deserve all the stellar IPs that they currently own, especially Silent Hill. The Silent Hills and PT fiasco really shed some light on the current mindset of this company. And what good is Metal Gear without Hideo Kojima? I swear, they seem to be doing everything possible to piss off the fans of these great games. They’ve really shown themselves to be terrible stewards of these franchises so I would welcome any kind of ownership change, be it from Microsoft or practically anyone else, really. A buyout is probably the only thing that’s going to release these IPs from languishing in creative neglect. If they want to keep focusing on Pachinko machines and cell phone apps then they have no business being a games publisher.  Silent Hills looked soooo great and had some incredible talent behind it. So damned frustrating…

 

Konami:

 

Even though whilst i could appreciate what Team Silent were attempting with Silent Hill 3 and not taking to it like I had the earlier games, it was with a sense of utter disbelief i recieved news Konami were going to have outside studios make future Silent Hill titles. 

 

 

Team Silent just simply knew what they were doing and why Silent Hill wasn't your standard Hollywood Horror style game. 

 

 

To see it reduced to a HOTD style light gun game for the arcades, was a testament to how little regard the franchise was later given. 

 

 

?

[Matt_B]

On 1/22/2022 at 2:34 PM, cimerians said:

Oh Phil

 

https://www.pcgamer.com/phil-spencer-wants-to-bring-back-the-activision-blizzard-games-he-loved-as-a-kid/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=socialflow&fbclid=IwAR1RECBeGLtc6cInqu1l48hz0F_C14FFXMVlGVFLQpCREBeP_jDgrFzQ2so

Yeah, bring back Guitar Hero! Oh, hang on Activision already did that in 2015 and it bombed.

 

Er... maybe bring back King's Quest then? No, they did that in 2016. It wasn't bad but it's pretty much dead again now.

 

WTF is Hexen?! It's a second rate Doom mod in a generic fantasy setting. You'll need a quarter century of rose tinted hindsight to get much out of that game.

 

Seriously, I'm sure there's gold to be found digging through the ActiBliz legacy catalogue but a more hard-nosed appraisal is going to be required and I'm pretty sure those three aren't it.

[Lord Mushroom]

19 hours ago, Lostdragon said:

It would make no buisness sense to ignore a combined user base of over 100 million users. 

It can if they make it up in higher market share in console sales and/or cloud gaming. And the actual number may not be that high. Some Playstation owners have, or will buy, an Xbox. And almost all of them own a platform which can play their streaming service.

[Lord Mushroom]

9 hours ago, Matt_B said:

Seriously, I'm sure there's gold to be found digging through the ActiBliz legacy catalogue but a more hard-nosed appraisal is going to be required and I'm pretty sure those three aren't it.

Blizzard released their first game as late as 1991 (under a different name). They still managed to produce a retro gem, though: Rock´n Roll Racing. 

 

Activision, of course, has a ton of gems.

[zzip]

On 1/23/2022 at 8:44 AM, Lostdragon said:

Do they answer to shareholders? 

 

It would make no buisness sense to ignore a combined user base of over 100 million users. 

Sure, but gaming is a drop in the bucket of MS revenue, so MS has been able to make bone-headed moves in their gaming division without affecting their stock price.   Some shareholder groups have wanted MS to spin off the Xbox division for years.

[zzip]

14 hours ago, Matt_B said:

WTF is Hexen?! It's a second rate Doom mod in a generic fantasy setting. You'll need a quarter century of rose tinted hindsight to get much out of that game.

Hexen was based on the Doom engine, but had a number of interesting enhancements to it.   It may look bad now, but so does the original Doom.   They keep releasing new Doom games,  so why not new Heretic/Hexen games?

[Tanooki]

@Lord Mushroom Well yeah they went by also Silicon and Synapse, but while Rock & Roll Racing is name worthy it's sad to see forget/dismiss Blackthorne and Lost Vikings (1 and 2) which are every bit as good if not better.  Blizzard has a rich 30 year history under them with few fizzling pieces of garbage to be held accountable to.

 

@zzip IP purgatory and lawsuits etc for decades.  Raven has some pieces, iD has some other pieces, it was spread into the wind and none of them or future owners of said companies could get over being infantile about it and let Heretic/Hexen just rot.  The only inch ever given was the rights to re-release the old titles as-is like on GoG using dosbox, minimal service.  It's not for a lack of interest I would hope, but maybe by now they're so largely forgotten compared to Doom and Quake it's just not profitable enough to care.  In that case you'd almost need someone to go all black-ops, make/nearly finish a game, then pitch it to the current owners to see if they'd be cool with an 'indie' release they could cash in on without having to waste their own time with it which is sad.

[Matt_B]

7 hours ago, zzip said:

Hexen was based on the Doom engine, but had a number of interesting enhancements to it.   It may look bad now, but so does the original Doom.   They keep releasing new Doom games,  so why not new Heretic/Hexen games?

One word: Sales

 

Doom games keep getting made because they sold in the millions, with the games generally being at the cutting edge of technology and attracting great reviews. In contrast, the last Hexen game sold about 30,000 copies. I'd think that the only reason anyone would have heard about it in the past twenty years though, is that Doom source ports can handle the WAD files.

 

That said, Microsoft have been pretty good when it comes to dusting off the Bethesda back catalogue and getting classic games re-released for modern platforms, so I could definitely see Hexen getting that treatment alongside a lot of other Activision games. I'd just think that, of all the IP they've picked up in the deal, it's a bit of a weird one to single out.

[zzip]

7 minutes ago, Tanooki said:

IP purgatory and lawsuits etc for decades.  Raven has some pieces, iD has some other pieces, it was spread into the wind and none of them or future owners of said companies could get over being infantile about it and let Heretic/Hexen just rot.  The only inch ever given was the rights to re-release the old titles as-is like on GoG using dosbox, minimal service.  It's not for a lack of interest I would hope, but maybe by now they're so largely forgotten compared to Doom and Quake it's just not profitable enough to care.  In that case you'd almost need someone to go all black-ops, make/nearly finish a game, then pitch it to the current owners to see if they'd be cool with an 'indie' release they could cash in on without having to waste their own time with it which is sad.

I don't think there's enough interest in those games for Activision,  it seems like they're only interested in releasing mega-selling game franchises these days.  The only way I see it happening is if someone like Phil pushes the issue, and then maybe they assemble a small team to update classics.

 

Or if they sell off/license those old franchises to smaller studios actually interested in using the IP

 

These days,  the Dark Souls series mostly scratches my Heretic itch.  

 

[zzip]

7 minutes ago, Matt_B said:

One word: Sales

 

Doom games keep getting made because they sold in the millions, with the games generally being at the cutting edge of technology and attracting great reviews. In contrast, the last Hexen game sold about 30,000 copies. I'd think that the only reason anyone would have heard about it in the past twenty years though, is that Doom source ports can handle the WAD files.

They Fucked it up along the way.   The first Heretic and Hexen sold more than a million copies combined.    Those games were a pretty big deal at the time.   Not as big as Doom, certainly.

 

When "Heretic 2" came out it was like a completely different game.   A third-person game instead of first person.   There was suddenly dialogue,  the art style is very different,  only a few items and character names carried over to remind you that you were playing a Heretic game, otherwise they could have named it anything.   And as a result, it of course it flopped and that was end of the series.

[Lord Mushroom]

14 hours ago, Tanooki said:

it's sad to see forget/dismiss Blackthorne and Lost Vikings (1 and 2) which are every bit as good if not better.

I knew about those games, but as they are in genres I don´t like (and I haven´t even played the Lost Vikings games), it is hard for me to judge their quality.

 

You probably already know this, but they recently released a game called Blizzard Arcade Collection, which included Blackthorne, The Lost Vikings and Rock´n Roll Racing with additional features.They have given Rock´n Roll Racing a 4-player versus mode amongst other things. The Lost Vikings 2 and RPM Racing in original versions only were later added.

[Flojomojo]

On 1/21/2022 at 10:34 PM, cimerians said:

Oh Phil

 

https://www.pcgamer.com/phil-spencer-wants-to-bring-back-the-activision-blizzard-games-he-loved-as-a-kid/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=socialflow&fbclid=IwAR1RECBeGLtc6cInqu1l48hz0F_C14FFXMVlGVFLQpCREBeP_jDgrFzQ2so

I think it's funny how "games we played as kids" is a sliding window, depending on the age of the speaker. This guy is talking about games from 25 years ago, while some smaller companies are trying to do it with games from 40 years ago. 

 

If nothing else, this big Microsoft purchase will make Sony sit up and pay attention. 

[Matt_B]

I expect Sony will respond by buying Ubisoft or something.

[Tanooki]

13 hours ago, Lord Mushroom said:

I knew about those games, but as they are in genres I don´t like (and I haven´t even played the Lost Vikings games), it is hard for me to judge their quality.

 

You probably already know this, but they recently released a game called Blizzard Arcade Collection, which included Blackthorne, The Lost Vikings and Rock´n Roll Racing with additional features.They have given Rock´n Roll Racing a 4-player versus mode amongst other things. The Lost Vikings 2 and RPM Racing in original versions only were later added.

Fair enough.  I usually hate games like Lost Vikings, but I bought that one on disk back when it was on the market and I slugged it out so I got hooked on it despite (much like how I care about Advance Wars, the first Ogre Battle, and some Fire Emblem games despite utterly hating that genre on the big scheme of it.)  Blackthorne though I'd put it on the same tier/shelf as one would with Delphines Out of This World and definitely Flashback, it's just fantastic.  I knew about the collection, never bought it though, they if you look still it's well hidden now (compared to before) because of the collection but they give away RnRR, LV1 and Blackthorne free on their battle.net site but it's a hidden dig now.  LV is dosboxed, RNRR is the SNES version using zsnes oddly enough(win ver), and blackthorne is a windows 32/64bit executable of all things so it's easily used.

[Lostdragon]

Now there are rumours of Apple poaching MS Engineers with aim of them entering the console market? 

 

?

[+wongojack]

2 hours ago, Lostdragon said:

Now there are rumours of Apple poaching MS Engineers with aim of them entering the console market? 

 

?

I would think Apple would be right in this fight, but not to release a console.  They should instead be working on their own content delivery and focus on the customers they already have using their devices.  They can simply send content on the hardware that already exists and then partner with Microsoft (or Sony) to get to the console gamers.  Despite what many think, Apple and Microsoft work very well together and share a lot of IP.

 

Anyway, if Apple were to acquire EA or Take Two, that would throw them right in the mix as a serious competitor to become the next "Netflix of gaming."

[cimerians]

16 minutes ago, wongojack said:

I would think Apple would be right in this fight, but not to release a console.  They should instead be working on their own content delivery and focus on the customers they already have using their devices. 

That's what I was thinking. If I was apple the last thing I would want to do is release a dedicated gaming MAC. I think gamepass is already working on apple devices so what's the point. They absolutely will not do anything physical like CD’s etc. I'd be on the phone with them saying how do we get our stuff to work on Xbox. 

 

Then again I don't know, maybe they want to cash in on the hardware hungry couch gamers. Good luck on making it affordable lol 

 

 

[+wongojack]

Blog from Satya (MS CEO)

 

Adapting ahead of regulation: a principled approach to app stores - Microsoft On the Issues

 

<snip>

Just as Windows has evolved to an open and broadly used platform, we see the future of gaming following a similar path. Today 2.8 billion consumers worldwide, including more than 190 million Americans, play games, and we expect the global number will reach 4.5 billion by 2030 as new generations turn to gaming for entertainment, community, and a sense of achievement. Our vision is to enable gamers to play any game on any device anywhere, including by streaming from the cloud. 

 

<snip>

First, some commentators have asked whether we will continue to make popular content like Activision’s Call of Duty available on competing platforms like Sony’s PlayStation. The obvious concern is that Microsoft could make this title available exclusively on the Xbox console, undermining opportunities for Sony PlayStation users.

To be clear, Microsoft will continue to make Call of Duty and other popular Activision Blizzard titles available on PlayStation through the term of any existing agreement with Activision. And we have committed to Sony that we will also make them available on PlayStation beyond the existing agreement and into the future so that Sony fans can continue to enjoy the games they love. We are also interested in taking similar steps to support Nintendo’s successful platform.