Microsoft's acquisition of Activison Blizzard
- Thread starter Darth Vader
- Start date
In my opinion Activision doesn’t have a plan B, hence the increasingly unhinged and desperate tweets from that lulu lady. They’ve burned the bridge with Sony but Xbox is dead worldwide that they won’t sign a marketing deal with them. In my opinion they’ll bend the knee, reup their marketing agreements with Sony but Sony won’t ever put them front and center in one of their shows again. That’s my opinion and that’s assuming the deal is blocked.
Yup and if I was Sony, I'd be working on several 'boots on the ground' shooters to compete with COD....
Not only due to Activisions actions but also because the genre is just so damned stale right now.
I do think that large scale battles is the way to go with destructible buildings and vehicles but put new twists on it..
Activision needs to learn to compete as well as Xbox / MSFT..... they've had it pretty easy till now.
D
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This would be a great opportunity to dethrone COD or take some market share, while launching a multiplayer VR game. It doesn't need to be fancy, even CS:S in VR would be a hell of a lot of fun.
It is hilarious to think about how similarly Activision and Xbox have fucked themselves business-wise by finding one big hit and riding it into the ground, but really pathetic that Activision has done it with multiple franchises over the past 20 years without Bobby Kotex ever figuring out where he's going wrong.
Back in the day he was always investing in new projects that hit it big. CoD, Guitar Hero, Skylanders... That all changed about ten years ago with Destiny and since then his picks have been a mix of busts and break evens. Meanwhile those other things have gradually fallen away except for CoD. CoD (and Crash and Spyro retro games) is all the Activision side has left.
The mental gymnastics in this thread by some of the posters here is hilarious. I've never seen such an amount of childish chanting and crying over a company branding. The sheep and clown syndrome is real.
And you, being a paid shill, are the embodiment of it!
Go act like an "Adult" elsewhere. Maybe call Rare and see if they will still let you mop their men's room.
And every one of those franchises were squeezed for every last penny, destroying their value completely in a few years when they could have still been going. Not to mention killing studios like Neversoft and Raven by forcing them to be support studios for a single title.
Worst thing is, the Neversoft Guitar Hero games were never good, and the Tony Hawk games made by anyone other than Neversoft were all shit too!
This poor guy need some medical help, im being serious here, so much delusion cant be goodlol I can't, these Xbox fans so desperate
Agree with you that this is a potential main goal for Microsoft, but there's an easy reason why this would still fail: console gamers don't care for these kind of games on console. It's really that simple.
MS can pad sub numbers by rolling King's into GP, but anyone (especially a publisher) with a good head on their shoulders is going to know why those numbers suddenly shot up. The context of those numbers, for a console game maker, will effectively tell them that in spite of the numbers being big, their value to them is worthless. It's like Nintendo looking at all the Counter-Strike players and going "Why don't we sell them on Mario Kart?". The reason Nintendo doesn't do anything like that is because they know in spite of Counter-Strike's numbers, their relevancy to Nintendo and to their IP specifically, are worthless.
Now, the actual revenue those 250 million users bring to Xbox, that could be a determining factor, but even there the context would still rely on knowing where that money is coming from. It isn't from sales of more traditional games on console or PC, it's coming from revenue from MTX-heavy mobile games. Unless companies like Capcom, Square-Enix, Annapurna etc. start shifting their games to a very mobile-centric MTX-heavy design model (which in some cases they have done, usually to the detriment or failure of non-mobile games and in the case of mobile entries, only by making clearly different games on existing IP with significantly smaller budgets & lower gameplay & technical ambitions than the real, mainline console/PC releases), then that metric means nothing to them.
From that lens I can EASILY see the worry among a lot of gamers, though, because if that's the direction Microsoft ultimately do encourage console gaming to take, simply so that Microsoft can make more money, then in a way those 2012 fears of consoles dying to mobile take a twisted path to manifesting as true. Ultimately it could lead to a reduced scope of ambition across the AAA and upper-tier AA side of the industry, resulting in shallower games, less visually impressive games, less blockbuster games to push the industry forward creatively/technically etc. Which is why I don't hop on the recent trend fearmongering the "problems" of AAA games, just because some publishers are bad at maintaining consistent quality or realistic development budgets even in light of costs going up. I do think there are real issues with the AAA industry but none of them require it to fall apart in order to be fixed. Hence me ignoring the fearmongering.
My respect for this company/brand is already at an all-time low. At this point, it's bottomed-out.
A real shame, too. I thought they were at least somewhat doing the right thing from late 2019 - up to mid 2020. It's been a slow decline since launch though, with small cracks here and there from then.
Last year though, it just seems like the entire dam started falling apart. And since December 8th, it busted open altogether. The fallout simply isn't stopping.
Also this confirms my initial concerns with the subpoena; none of the info highlighted there is pertinent, and we all know how leaky Microsoft is with their own content. Now imagine "certain" marketing pieces, outlets and content creators just "conveniently" getting access on this type of information and using it to spin narratives online for years to come.
Completely poisoning any genuine discussions in the hobby and potentially negatively impacting Sony/PlayStation financially (I remember when SEGA cancelled their stuff with 3DFX in Dreamcast partly because 3DFX were in a court case where they revealed they were working with SEGA on the Dreamcast, before SEGA were ready to talk about it).
Yeah. And with it, most of their remaining goodwill with me, is (almost) gone. I want them to be successful in gaming, but I don't think it's healthy in the long-term for the industry if that came from them as a platform holder on the traditional business model. They shouldn't need to request obviously non-pertinent business info to know how to run a successful console business. They DID IT THEMSELVES with the 360 over a decade ago!
Why don't they start by getting Seamus Blackley and J Allard back in the fold? Get the engineers and marketing talents for the OG Xbox & 360 back? That would be an actual start. Maybe review their marketing strategies during the pre-Kinect 360 era? Asking for upper management employee performance reviews, all 3P content deals Sony have for 11 years out...why aren't YOU having honest reviews of upper management, or negotiating long-term 3P deals, Microsoft? Why did you not try doing this years ago?
These dudes are acting like they're fish out of water, completely aloof to what it takes to run a successful gaming division, I guess they have goldfish memory of the 360 era then. Because if Microsoft want to know a REAL "mindblowing", "secret sauce" secret, how's this? Sony's "secret sauce"...is simply them doing what YOU did with the 360, just better! That's it
!!! Their aggressive 3P marketing deals? Yeah, they got that from 360-era MS. "Gaming-first" hardware design? They did what MS did during 360 era (other than potentially illegally get CPU tech they shouldn't have had) and listened to gamers & game developers. High-quality exclusives? Again, looked at 360 and set things up not just to push their 1P to new levels (since they were pretty much forced to do it), but also help 3P push to new levels, too.It's kind of pissing me off how they're acting like Sony got this crazy strategy from space aliens, when Sony just kept in mind what mattered most, actually prioritized PlayStation as a brand (both in quality and in terms of global market presence) and took everything from 360-era MS that worked, incorporated it into their own strategy and further refined it. That is not secret sauce, it's common sense.
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I just love the delusion that MS will somehow give the Xbox division tens of billions to spend on exclusives, or that publishers will sell any exclusives to Xbox with the sales of the series having totally cratered like they did last quarter.
they've already cost sony money, $2 million in legal fees and counting.Agree with you that this is a potential main goal for Microsoft, but there's an easy reason why this would still fail: console gamers don't care for these kind of games on console. It's really that simple.
MS can pad sub numbers by rolling King's into GP, but anyone (especially a publisher) with a good head on their shoulders is going to know why those numbers suddenly shot up. The context of those numbers, for a console game maker, will effectively tell them that in spite of the numbers being big, their value to them is worthless. It's like Nintendo looking at all the Counter-Strike players and going "Why don't we sell them on Mario Kart?". The reason Nintendo doesn't do anything like that is because they know in spite of Counter-Strike's numbers, their relevancy to Nintendo and to their IP specifically, are worthless.
Now, the actual revenue those 250 million users bring to Xbox, that could be a determining factor, but even there the context would still rely on knowing where that money is coming from. It isn't from sales of more traditional games on console or PC, it's coming from revenue from MTX-heavy mobile games. Unless companies like Capcom, Square-Enix, Annapurna etc. start shifting their games to a very mobile-centric MTX-heavy design model (which in some cases they have done, usually to the detriment or failure of non-mobile games and in the case of mobile entries, only by making clearly different games on existing IP with significantly smaller budgets & lower gameplay & technical ambitions than the real, mainline console/PC releases), then that metric means nothing to them.
From that lens I can EASILY see the worry among a lot of gamers, though, because if that's the direction Microsoft ultimately do encourage console gaming to take, simply so that Microsoft can make more money, then in a way those 2012 fears of consoles dying to mobile take a twisted path to manifesting as true. Ultimately it could lead to a reduced scope of ambition across the AAA and upper-tier AA side of the industry, resulting in shallower games, less visually impressive games, less blockbuster games to push the industry forward creatively/technically etc. Which is why I don't hop on the recent trend fearmongering the "problems" of AAA games, just because some publishers are bad at maintaining consistent quality or realistic development budgets even in light of costs going up. I do think there are real issues with the AAA industry but none of them require it to fall apart in order to be fixed. Hence me ignoring the fearmongering.
My respect for this company/brand is already at an all-time low. At this point, it's bottomed-out.
A real shame, too. I thought they were at least somewhat doing the right thing from late 2019 - up to mid 2020. It's been a slow decline since launch though, with small cracks here and there from then.
Last year though, it just seems like the entire dam started falling apart. And since December 8th, it busted open altogether. The fallout simply isn't stopping.
Also this confirms my initial concerns with the subpoena; none of the info highlighted there is pertinent, and we all know how leaky Microsoft is with their own content. Now imagine "certain" marketing pieces, outlets and content creators just "conveniently" getting access on this type of information and using it to spin narratives online for years to come.
Completely poisoning any genuine discussions in the hobby and potentially negatively impacting Sony/PlayStation financially (I remember when SEGA cancelled their stuff with 3DFX in Dreamcast partly because 3DFX were in a court case where they revealed they were working with SEGA on the Dreamcast, before SEGA were ready to talk about it).
Yeah. And with it, most of their remaining goodwill with me, is (almost) gone. I want them to be successful in gaming, but I don't think it's healthy in the long-term for the industry if that came from them as a platform holder on the traditional business model. They shouldn't need to request obviously non-pertinent business info to know how to run a successful console business. They DID IT THEMSELVES with the 360 over a decade ago!
Why don't they start by getting Seamus Blackley and J Allard back in the fold? Get the engineers and marketing talents for the OG Xbox & 360 back? That would be an actual start. Maybe review their marketing strategies during the pre-Kinect 360 era? Asking for upper management employee performance reviews, all 3P content deals Sony have for 11 years out...why aren't YOU having honest reviews of upper management, or negotiating long-term 3P deals, Microsoft? Why did you not try doing this years ago?
These dudes are acting like they're fish out of water, completely aloof to what it takes to run a successful gaming division, I guess they have goldfish memory of the 360 era then. Because if Microsoft want to know a REAL "mindblowing", "secret sauce" secret, how's this? Sony's "secret sauce"...is simply them doing what YOU did with the 360, just better! That's it
It's kind of pissing me off how they're acting like Sony got this crazy strategy from space aliens, when Sony just kept in mind what mattered most, actually prioritized PlayStation as a brand (both in quality and in terms of global market presence) and took everything from 360-era MS that worked, incorporated it into their own strategy and further refined it. That is not secret sauce, it's common sense.
And they're are directly involved with delaying a PS showcase that would excite us PS5 owners, too. So they are kinda fucking us as well.
First procedural dispute between Sony and Microsoft in Activision Blizzard FTC proceeding: Sony suggests it will cost many millions of dollars to answer Microsoft's questions
We're now witnessing the first legal--albeit only procedural--dispute between Sony and Microsoft in connection with the latter's acquisition...
big company, sure, but $2 mil is a lot of fucking money and time wasted when sony has no business with this shitty & illegal deal other than being screwed over and having their biggest 3rd part partner taken off the market by ms.
MS is acting like a spoiled baby and want to sabotage Sony in the process.
Poor 2.5 trillion dollar company, everyone should help them, give free marketing, few exclusives, why not? SAVE XBOX!!
Interesting, I would also like to add that I've seen that lawyer's website before and he admits to being currently affiliated with Microsoft in terms of legal counsel. His writings seem fairly biased and it's pretty obvious why.they've already cost sony money, 2 million in legal fees and counting.
and are directly involved with delaying a PS showcase that would excite us PS5 owners, too.
First procedural dispute between Sony and Microsoft in Activision Blizzard FTC proceeding: Sony suggests it will cost many millions of dollars to answer Microsoft's questions
We're now witnessing the first legal--albeit only procedural--dispute between Sony and Microsoft in connection with the latter's acquisition...www.fosspatents.com
big company, sure, but 2 mil is a lot of fucking money and time wasted when sony has no business with this shitty & illegal deal other than being screwed over and having their biggest 3rd part partner taken off the market by ms.
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It's just damned funny. The COD exclusivity deal that Sony only got because MS created it in tandem with Activision to box the PS3 out of the market and create the assumption that COD was an Xbox 360 exclusive, the exact same deal sony was only able to steal out from under them after they publicly came out on stage at the XBONE event and told everyone they were going to steal your rights away, TVTVTV and a tech demo of the COD Ghosts dog completely flipped the marketshare against their favor.
MS, the COD deal is YOUR DEAL! You created it!
Oh and Square-Enix is skipping you, too? OH NO!
Project Silpheed
Infinite Undiscovery
The Last remnant
Star Ocean 4
Were all Square Enix games MS paid to keep off of PS3. Last remnant was moneyhatted so long it was eventually cancelled on PS3, and resurfaced on PlayStation only 11 years later, on PS4.
They even had a marketing deal for Final Fantasy 13:
It really is a case of, "To the victor go the spoils". Maybe if you played fair, Sony wouldn't be so ruthless nowadays. But they remember well what a snake in the grass MS is. MS was trying everything they could to take PlyStation out of this business.
so sorry, you bums! HA HA
People tend to get a bit dramatic on Sundays. All just a hullabaloo.
ThreadBanned the dude for telling the truth
They are still talking about the Gran Turismo quote and the Jim Ryan email like that's enough to get mad at him/Sony. What a bunch of idiots.