Comment on Microsoft’s Activision Blizzard deal gets preliminary approval from UK regulator
lustyargonian@lemm.ee 9 months ago
Let’s hope they can chew what they’ve attempted to eat. They can barely manage their first party studios, and now they’re going to attempt to manage one of the biggest publisher/studio.
Neato@kbin.social 9 months ago
Manage? They just want the money from King and to prevent games from releasing on PlayStation.
lustyargonian@lemm.ee 9 months ago
I mean yeah, that’s how acquisitions and exclusivity works. It’s not like PlayStation bought Bungie to lose money or make exclusivity deals with third parties to bring games to Xbox. That’s just how this industry works.
By manage I mean, they’re gonna handle so many companies without a good track record of being able to do it. To make the money from King they will need to be able to retain talent and steward its properties properly.
Neato@kbin.social 9 months ago
No they don't. As we've already seen, MS doesn't have to do anything in regards to development. Promotion, marketing will get a boost but they can be hands off most of the technical details and still make bank. Bethesda, King and Activision are all quite profitable on their own. Now they simply can't develop for Sony and they get distributed on Game Pass day 1.
Also, exclusionary buy-outs are bad for the market and should not have been allowed. MS buying up huge game competitors and then restricting their choice on which platforms to develop for is clearly anti-competitive behavior.
lustyargonian@lemm.ee 9 months ago
You’re right, they’ve been hands off and basically done bare minimum for marketing and promotion. And it hasn’t been working well for them at all, exhibit A: Halo Infinite, exhibit B: Redfall. Clearly they can’t sustain this anymore.
Starfield has been probably the first example where they actually got invested in the production, delayed a game by a year, got their entire QA team test it.
Regarding exclusionary buyouts, I don’t know if you aren’t aware of it. But it has been a thing in this industry for decades. This is how Sony got where it is today, by being highly competitive by making exclusionary deals and buying studios with whom they had exclusionary deals with for years. Sony entered this industry out of nowhere and bought their way into success, and everyone agrees that only made the market more competitive. Xbox had no games and was not bringing competition in market, and now that it has more games, it’s anti competitive?
The difference with MSFT is that they bring their games to PC (an open platform) via Steam, and to Xbox, along with a price accessible service of GamePass, so it doesn’t force a gamer into first buying a $400 console and then a $70 game to play on it.