Microsoft’s $69bn deal to buy Call of Duty maker Activision Blizzard cleared by UK
Microsoft’s $69bn deal to buy Call of Duty maker Activision Blizzard cleared by UK
Competition regulator had initially moved to block acquisition but concerns addressed
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I'm torn between wanting Activision to get new management and not wanting Microsoft to aquire two major companies and dominate the market
It's really bad. This is all about Game Pass. MS wants to acquire enough of the industry big IPs to force people onto Game Pass. All of tech right now is trying really hard to get people locked into subscriptions because it's effectively free, easy money. You don't have to convince consumers to constantly buy new stuff. You just need to dissuade them from canceling a subscription, which is much easier.
Then they just gobble up more of the market share until they've hit their theoretical maximum. Then they can raise prices because they've captured the market and driven competitors away. They've already made it so you pretty much need Game Pass if you own an Xbox. Long-term they could stop selling PC games on Steam, but they probably won't because the PC market is so much smaller than console and they can point to that as a "win" for consumer choice.
Sony has nothing successful enough compared to Game Pass and as they fall further behind they'll likely abandon it entirely.
Then enshitification sets in and all the games suck.
We're well past that point.
I am in a similar boat, but i don't think this is THAT big of a deal.
Blizzard is mostly a shell of its former self. FF14 has taken over as the default theme park MMO and Riot own the majority of the sweaty RTS super genre. Also whatever Overwatch counted as.
As for Activision proper? Mostly they've let their IPs languish in favor of CoD. And CoD is still huge, but it is not the industry controlling monster it used to be AND MS are "committed" to keeping that multi-platform (because that is where the money is).
I still think Bethesda/Zenimax was the big "holy shit" acquisition. Obviously Skyrim is one of the biggest games of all time and prints money. But it was mostly all the sub-studios (Machine Games, for example) that very much dominate the "third party" market.
I think King is probably the really big part of this acquisition but... I've never understood the mobile market so I am not even sure if that is still as dominant as I think it is?
Out of all the games you listed, I believe King prints the most $ for Activision.
Oh yeah. King is freaking massive
My point is more that I don't know how much of that is because of how insane the mobile gaming market is versus king still being particularly dominant in that market.
I think it's a bit of both. King is a big name in the market, but mobile gaming is just such a massive revenue stream for companies anyways. IIRC, the mobile market accounts for more money than all other gaming markets combined.
Which I still hold as fucking stupid, why play a shitty mobile game when ya could just emulate the entire SNES games catalogue.
Those aren't the same customer demographics. The overwhelming majority of mobile phone gamers don't know the first thing about emulators. Not to mention, other factors like mobile games being designed to tap into addictive triggers in the brain, social engineering, etc.
I am aware its just incomprehensible for me.
I mean when Microsoft purchased Bethesda it made things better than they were at the time and we got access to a lot more older titles. Just look at what Redfall was and then compare it to Starfield. Microsoft didn’t have any hands in Redfall but did in Starfield.
I don't think this is really a good comparison since Starfield was in development for years before Microsoft came in. Plus, Redfall was forced by management to shoehorn in a live service model with mtx during its development, butchering what it had been before.
And, this is just my personal opinion, but I think Starfield is a pretty mediocre game. Besides the ship design, it's largely the same design that Bethesda has had since Oblivion.