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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
