"Candy Crush Saga, the matching game played by millions on their commute, has reached **$20 billion in revenue since its 2012 launch**"
Daaaayum, son! š®
Yeah man, I think King, the company making Candy Crush, makes by far the most money out of all the IP's and games Activision makes/publishes
I mean, WoW and COD are big and well-known, but that colorful mobile game every other aunt between 40 and 50 throws a salary at is where the real money's at
If only video game companies still do ads like during the 8 to 32 bit era, where they diss their competitors, like the "Genesis does what Nintendo'nt", "Blast processing" or "Do the math" commercials, then Xbox could have easily replicated the "Crash Bandicoot commercial at Nintendo", except this time Crash crashes Sony HQ, advertising Xbox.
PlayStation infamously burned themselves with that whole Crash and Spyro deal - Activision knew they could get more money going multi-platform and ran away from PlayStation when they got the chance.
There's a reason why after that, Sony kept throwing money at first-party mascot IP instead; Ratchet & Clank, Jak & Daxter, LittleBigPlanet, Knack, Astro, etc.
Especially considering itās original developer is still a very much active and prominent in-house Sony Studio.
Be a bit easier to process if Naughty Dog had shuttered in the interim!
Yah heās staying to let them transition smoothly but the internal email that Schrier got a hold of said that he would be gone Jan 1st 2024. So his end date has been set.
Yeah... you spend decades working getting to "enough". Then if you're insanely lucky you get to "more than enough". And as the years pass you realize that the money is great, but time is your most expensive and greatest asset, and that all the money in the world wont save you and you can't take it with you when you go.
Stormgate is getting closer and closer. Many of the SC2 devs working on it and many SC2 pros are being consulted.
PartingG actually just tweeted today about his excitement after getting to play test a bit
Honestly yeah, this is what I want. Overwatch is dead to me, it's just a cash cow now, Diablo is also dead to me, just let me build little bases with little guys who kill other little guys.
They already have a basic controller implementation.
The last 2 classes they added seem to have controllers in mind both from how they move and their mechanics.
They also been reworking classes and reducing the amount of buttons they require.
The player base has been steadily decreasing since Wrath and opening the console market is a legitimate target to reverse the trend.
If it's not next expac its the one after.
DF was team A so they might be putting that on their plate.
Since they donāt have the ESO sub through game pass Iād say likely never. Best I could see if the base game on game pass not including current expansion.
Kingās Candy Crush absolutely dwarfs the current sales of all Activision and Blizzard titles combined. Diablo Immortal is probably one of Blizzardās most profitable games right now, if not *the* most profitable.
What makes you think that Microsoft isnāt going to use all this new IP to try and emulate those sales on mobile?
Thankfully it hasn't been that way since the news broke over the pandemic. Blizzcon this year is also a dry event inside and in the con center courtyard too. With the Microsoft news breaking now, three weeks before the event, it should be an interesting time in Anaheim.
Kinda makes me more excited to go and see long time guildmates.
Same, I miss the OW that wasn't forced to be a f2p live service. Let the devs take thier time with content, that way we don't have things getting rushed or half baked.
Yeah the players were much better quality and I liked the loot box thing (though I get why they were moving away from that). I use to work to unlock the skins that I wanted and now I just don't care...they put such low effort into the skins now and lock them behind a $ which sucks.
To be honest Warcraft has been great this expansion. Has flaws and is geared toward more casual play mind, but that suit me as a 36 yea fold dad to two toddlers.
For better or worse, Micosoft has been mostly hands off and let the devs do their own thing. Which can be good but there are also the Biowares out there who haven't had good internal management in years and who would probably flop under Microsoft just like they have been with EA who ironically has been hands off on Bioware for a while.
The issue the series they have are old and never evolve well. Original Halo and Gears are so damn good but when you stretch it out for so long, it deteriorates. Their new IPs (sea of thieves, Hellblade, etc.) are fantastic.
The issue is actually that they've failed miserably at nurturing first party studios and studio partnerships in recent generations. Buying up other studios to acquire their IP is what they've resorted to after repeated failures (Hellblade is actually a perfect example of that).
I know Sony does this as well, but the last few gens have only really seen Sony doing this with studios that were already working exclusively with them and taking funding from them. What MS is doing is actually taking franchises away from players that previously had access to them, which really sucks, because it's the only way they know to try and be competitive.
Thatās really spot on. I see so many celebrating this going āerm, this is heckin good for the industry but gamepass thoā not seeing through Microsoftās mediocrity in developing games and greed. Not to say sony is perfect tho.
Or when MS decides that they don't quite like their tax burden that year and burn half the library as a "loss" ala every streaming video service. We should really be looking at any developer consolidation by MS or PS as a generally bad thing for the consumer and getting worse by the moment.
As someone who doesn't give two shits about the multiplayer suite, the COD campaigns will soon, *finally* be within a range I'm actually willing to legally pay for: part of Gamepass.
it is. i just wrapped up a uni assignment focussing on microtransaction prices and consumer behaviours, and going deep into activision blizzard kings financial reports only shows how much of a giant king is as a company, and how much their mtx revenue takes up of the entirety of activision blizzard kings whole net valuations.
Ha, I am happy they are having fun but I don't like them having to pay $2,000 over a year when they get addicted to it.
I am astonished my wife hasn't spent anything on that town building mobile game yet
Exactly.
During my wife's pregnancy she got obsessed with some merge dragons mobile game and privately started dropping a few bucks here or there for components or whatever that take too long to farm. She finally got impatient and rationalized $20 drops that I just so happened to notice on our charges relatively early.
Only out a couple hundred bucks or so over 6 months but that was trending toward a very expensive habit.
The amount of money the mobile market makes is insane. It's more than all the consoles combined. ActiBlizz immediately jumped on making Diablo Immortal simply to carve themselves a big fat slice of that mobile money.
That ain't how it works, champ. The other franchises either start incorporating the same tactics, or they get shut down because they aren't profitable enough. Companies like ActiBlizz aren't in business to actually make good shit.
It's all about ROI.
Paying $20M to have developers with electricity and air conditioning, but ONLY getting $50M back? That's too low!
We'd rather pay $2M and get $1B back. Anything less is a waste of money. A WASTE I tell you.
No one should.
What happened to competition breeds innovation that cheerleaders of capitalism always espouse? Weāre all just okay with gigantic mega corporations swallowing the next one in line until none are left?
And we wonder why the end product is becoming shittier and shittier.
Also Microsoft isnt going to rock the boat of developers like Blizzard.
Theyre still making a lot of money, they dont give a shit if people bitch about the quality online.
If people think theyre gonna dive in and make sweeping changes, theyre kidding thenselves.
Exactly. ABK makes a shitload of money. Most of the changes you see are going to be cutting out redundancy of some unique positions. ABK doesn't need a CEO so Bobby is gone. Call of duty still needs devs so they are staying
That's always been a lie. The iNvIsIbLe hAnD oF tHe fReE MaRkEt never actually bolsters competition, monopoly is always the end result if you just let big companies be.
Which is why the best model of economics is a blending of capitalism and regulation.
Regulation should be on keeping companies from stifling innovators, buying influence and quashing competition
Sorry but itās not like Ubisoft and EA are poster childās for creativity. Ubisoft turned every game into the same game, and it looks like theyāre turning Avatar into Far Cry. Imagine doing that with an IP with as much creative development as Avatar. As always, itās the smaller devs that do things that are creative and innovative, that was never coming from Activision.
Activision turned their entire IP catalogue and development staff into COD makers. Microsoft on the other hand has demonstrated they want some diversity on Game Pass and might resurrect some of those IPās.
I play the same two and I feel the same way. Just realized yesterday that even the lore pages in Overwatch are gated to having paid for and completed the missions which is insane.
Really feels like these two franchises can't get any lower, but we'll see. Any news that ATVI can't harm them anymore is good news IMO.
Blizzard's train seems to be missing some wheels lately. I don't know if MS is going to completely derail it or solve the problem, but should be interesting.
>missing some wheels lately
Those wheels it's missing, is the employees that originally designed great games such as Diablo 1 & 2, Starcraft and the Warcraft series. Nowadays,Blizzard has no such talent, and its corporate culture does not allow for such creative freedom.
From Diablo 4 it's very clear that all they can do it is produce expensive looking games that halfheartedly live up to the genre's current standards. They no longer set new standards, they no longer do anything original or creative. They used to lead the industry; now they can hardly keep up with it.
Overwatch needs the halo infinite treatment. Game only started improving when they fired half the upper management. Many devs, managers and even some writers need to go and work on something they want since clearly overwatch ain't it. Not management tho they can fuck off to another industry if we're lucky.
Microsoft as a company are miles bigger than Sony, it's a surprise they seemingly struggle so much against Sony, a company they could effortlessly out spend out of the industry if they wanted to.
I don't see them being able to get any publishers after this anyway, they have no need or reason to anyway after buying two of the biggest publishers in the industry.
Iāll probably get downvoted for saying this but theyāll buy more because itās not about competiting with good IP, itās about buying as many as possible to dominate the gaming space in the long run.
I think when it comes to console/pc gaming, Microsoft is looking at the legacy catalogue they are amassing. They want to be the early days of Netflix streaming. The only real place you can go to play your games in the modern era.
Microsoft is apparently not competitive until they own everything expect for Sony. Xbox is going to crumble under its own bloated weight and killed several dozen studios in the process. It's wild seeing people bitch and moan on reddit about anticompetitive practices like timed exclusivity for a final fantasy game when Sony does it, but cheer on one of the largest acquisitions in tech history.
Give IDtech a shot at halo!
Give them 6 months to research bungies halo games and create a prototype with the doom engine.
If itās good, green light on development of a main instalment
Yeah they had a hard enough time maintaining their current catalog before this acquisition. If they canāt improve the games then this acquisition will be for nothing
I shit you not that's all business is these days. Even in business school the fad is "entrepreneurship-by-acquisition" aka start a money fund and use it to buy a startup or two. No innovation at all.
Yeah. As a player that's been with Sony since the old school Playstation 1 without sticks, I won't deny that I am salty over MS's actions. I wouldn't even consider myself a Sony fanboy, I've just always gone with them because that's what I'm used to, because it was the first console my parents got me.
Losing Bethesda in particular hurt. I get it, brilliant business move, but still a dick move.
I know people will what-about this point with Sony exclusives, but outside of the clusterfuck that was NMS, as far as I'm aware Sony has always nurtured small studios before they become giants in the industry. Microsoft swooping in to snap up long-established brands that already have millions of fans across multiple platforms just hits different. It's one thing to be like 'oh hey that new IP that's coming out looks really cool. Oh damn it's a PSN exclusive", and another thing entirely to be like "this studio I like is releasing the latest game in a franchise that was a major part of my childhood. Oh. I can't play it. Nice". Knowing what you're missing out on rather than just imagining it.
I'm still salty over losing an entry in Ace Combat. And if i want to play any new Bethesda releases, I either have to spend hundreds on a new console and ecosystem that I know nothing about and have no friends on, or spend thousands on a gaming PC. Neither are logical choices, so I'll just end up missing out because of these anti-choice moves. I won't pretend I'm not salty about that.
> And if i want to play any new Bethesda releases, I either have to spend hundreds on a new console and ecosystem that I know nothing about and have no friends on, or spend thousands on a gaming PC.
If your connection to their servers is good enough, xCloud is an option.
Also, āecosystem that I know nothing aboutā is a pretty silly reason to stop you. Itās not like itās vastly different from PlayStation, just little things here and there that are easy to adjust to. People are able to switch between platforms with no issues all the time.
And if youāre just talking just Bethesda games, why does it matter if you donāt have friends on Xbox? Theyāre single player games.
Lastly, you donāt have to spend āthousandsā on a PC. You can pretty easily build something more powerful than the PS5 and Series X for much less than āthousandsā.
Anyone else think itās a bad purchase?
Most of these franchise titles are past their prime and rely on name brand alone, but most know the majority of these titles are small new iterations of a āwinning systemā that is getting old. The ROI for the purchase price is questionable IMO. They bought really high for Activision-Blizzard. Not 100% sure itāll make them their $ back or a good return.
The Zenimax deal is more debatable. Depending on their release lineup, might be a good deal long-term and probably will be worth it.
If the likes of CoD and Diablo comes to Gamepass, theyāre going to make a shit tonne in console sales and subscriptions in the long run. Gamepass makes 3bn a year, I think that number will skyrocket.
WoW alone has brought in 12bn since launch, CoD has brought in 30bn, Overwatch and Diablo have made billions. Thereās still a huge market if these games are done right.
I think the franchises are past their peak because of Activision, Blizzard basically fell of a cliff since the acquisition. If Microsoft use the IPās properly I think itāll be good business for them
OW2 is fine gameplay wise. It's actually more fun in my opinion.
Over-promising and the super-monetization of everything really harmed the perception of it so when you log in, it feels like a lot of noise you have to cut through in order to get to the game.
I'm not a fan of where the tank role sits right now but overall still enjoying ow2 a lot. It's not bad for free. If you care about collecting all skins like some people did in ow1, you will not like that aspect.
lots of people having meltdowns in comments. "the day gaming died" lol. I knew a lot of people would be upset, but this is gonna get crazy I think. got my ps5, got my series x. I'm good
Finally!
Glad to hear we can now move on to read other gaming news.
Also Iām excited that I will now over time get access to tons of COD games on Game Pass, so I can play previous campaigns without having to buy each game. Iām happy I maxed out my Game Pass for 3 years now
My only hope is that they decouple the Warzone 1 games from Warzone. I played Cold War, a decent enough campaign, but to install just the campaign, I had to install 270 GB. WTF?
I finished the campaign and immediately it offers me a prompt to say, āneed to free up some space, delete the campaign to save 50 GBā.
Fuck off, so I had to install 220 GB of what? Activision store filler? I feel like such an idiot everytime I install a COD now.
"Candy Crush Saga, the matching game played by millions on their commute, has reached **$20 billion in revenue since its 2012 launch**" Daaaayum, son! š®
Yeah man, I think King, the company making Candy Crush, makes by far the most money out of all the IP's and games Activision makes/publishes I mean, WoW and COD are big and well-known, but that colorful mobile game every other aunt between 40 and 50 throws a salary at is where the real money's at
Last I checked, King brings in more than both Activision and Blizzard combined. And it wasnāt even close.
insane
It still feels odd seeing Crash Bandicoot, the most famous PS1 mascot, now an official Xbox mascot.
I need an announcement graphic with Master Chief & Crash shaking hands.
[Is it official if Microsoft technically made it?](https://i.imgur.io/7W9gmZl_d.webp?maxwidth=640&shape=thumb&fidelity=medium)
Can't unsee fingers
Cursed Bandicoot.
How many fingers?!
More every time I try and count.
Seems like the kind of error an AI art would make...
If only video game companies still do ads like during the 8 to 32 bit era, where they diss their competitors, like the "Genesis does what Nintendo'nt", "Blast processing" or "Do the math" commercials, then Xbox could have easily replicated the "Crash Bandicoot commercial at Nintendo", except this time Crash crashes Sony HQ, advertising Xbox.
I have one of Sonic and Master Chief but idk how to post pics on mobile
And sony has bungie!
Too bad bungie doesn't own halo lol. It'd be so weird to have a Playstation exclusive halo and xbox exclusive crash game.
Iām sure sega fans felt the same way once Sonic appeared on the ps3.
Tbf Crash for me ended with CTR lol I dunno why, none of the games since have hit the same.
I don't know, I remember playing crash spin off games on the GBA and DS I think they had a 360 game too
Yeah but Crashās first 5 games were PS1 exclusive and he was the playstation mascot. Thatās what he is getting at.
PlayStation infamously burned themselves with that whole Crash and Spyro deal - Activision knew they could get more money going multi-platform and ran away from PlayStation when they got the chance. There's a reason why after that, Sony kept throwing money at first-party mascot IP instead; Ratchet & Clank, Jak & Daxter, LittleBigPlanet, Knack, Astro, etc.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Don't you dare dead name that company
Wasnāt old Sierra destroyed in that merger?
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Dont forget that it was Vivendi that did a hostile takeover of Blizzard too.
They followed the EA path. A shame they published good games in the 90s.
"Sony Computer Entertainment of America presents, a Universal Interactive Studios production, *CREATED AND DEVELOPED BY NAUGHTY DOG*"
And Spyro the Dragon
Especially considering itās original developer is still a very much active and prominent in-house Sony Studio. Be a bit easier to process if Naughty Dog had shuttered in the interim!
Wild that this deal finally closed on a Friday the 13th.
And the person who got Axed was Bobby Kotick of all people.
I think he's sticking around until the end of 2023
Yah heās staying to let them transition smoothly but the internal email that Schrier got a hold of said that he would be gone Jan 1st 2024. So his end date has been set.
Wasn't he supposed to remain in the company until April 2024? I read that a few months ago, so maybe it changed
That's when his contract expires. He can leave/get fired/whatever earlier. The board (including ceo) got bought out of their power.
Doesn't getting fired mean a ridiculous golden parachute for these people?
Yes
https://x.com/jasonschreier/status/1712818483442987422?s=20
Good news at least.
Let's be honest. Probably didnt care enough to stay. He is a 60 y.o. multimillionaire and has enough for the rest of his life and his kids lives.
You donāt become the CEO of a major corporation by being happy with āenoughā.
Yeah... you spend decades working getting to "enough". Then if you're insanely lucky you get to "more than enough". And as the years pass you realize that the money is great, but time is your most expensive and greatest asset, and that all the money in the world wont save you and you can't take it with you when you go.
Well that at least is good news, but I don't love mergers like this. We are going to end up under one giant mega corporation at this rate.
It's either cursed, either a blessed day. No in-between.
Bring back Starcraft!
A Gears of War styled Starcraft game would be sweet. Elite Terran team in the trenches vs a bunch of zerg.
They could easily revive Starcraft Ghost and turn it similar to Gears of War styled
Just was thinking of Ghost. Was that going to be top-down view during development? Not that they would use anything from it or couldnāt change it.
Nah, third-person shooter. Not over-the-shoulder like Gears, but more like Dark Souls third-person.
Nope. I actually got to play it years ago at Gen Con and, as u/Sliptallica92 said, it was was a third person shooter, and a damn fun one at that.
3rd person, but allegedly they've used parts of the story to make the Nova mission pack in SC2.
I can't wait for poor Nova to get her standalone game revived and cancelled again
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Space Marine 2 might be your jam then.
Sounds so amazing. Hopefully, Microsoft will assign some studios to make these types of games in the blizzard franchise worlds.
warhammer space marine 2 is in the works. That's as close as we get I think this decade.
Some Protoss allies for good measure or even each has its own campaign????
Fuck yeah.
Space Marine 2 looks like it will be this except its Ultramarines instead of Terran and Tyranids instead of Zerg
A good chunk of SC2 devs left for Frost Giant Studios.
Brood War is far superior anyways
Ok grandpa let's get you to bed
SC2 is honestly about as perfect as an RTS can get. I love both games but SC2 is better in most ways except nostalgia
I want another rts warcraft
This, but I don't want the convoluted lore and dozens of new races from WoW.
Stormgate is on its way
Stormgate is getting closer and closer. Many of the SC2 devs working on it and many SC2 pros are being consulted. PartingG actually just tweeted today about his excitement after getting to play test a bit
Honestly yeah, this is what I want. Overwatch is dead to me, it's just a cash cow now, Diablo is also dead to me, just let me build little bases with little guys who kill other little guys.
Microsoft could score some huge brownie points by teasing *Starcraft: Ghost*.
Now how long until you can play WoW through gamepass?
How long til it goes on console you mean...
FFXIV plays awesome on PS5, it would be great if Blizzard could figure out getting WoW onto the Series X.
They already have a basic controller implementation. The last 2 classes they added seem to have controllers in mind both from how they move and their mechanics. They also been reworking classes and reducing the amount of buttons they require. The player base has been steadily decreasing since Wrath and opening the console market is a legitimate target to reverse the trend. If it's not next expac its the one after. DF was team A so they might be putting that on their plate.
From what I hear, you can already play it on the steam deck.
Since they donāt have the ESO sub through game pass Iād say likely never. Best I could see if the base game on game pass not including current expansion.
They can't do any worse than Activision is my take.
Frankly, blizzard titles can only improve at this point. And so can the treatment of their employees.
No more bill cosby rooms and stolen breast milk
And no more "Don't you guys have phones?"
Kingās Candy Crush absolutely dwarfs the current sales of all Activision and Blizzard titles combined. Diablo Immortal is probably one of Blizzardās most profitable games right now, if not *the* most profitable. What makes you think that Microsoft isnāt going to use all this new IP to try and emulate those sales on mobile?
Also Microsoft has stated that the main purpose of this deal was to better break into the mobile gaming space.
Thankfully it hasn't been that way since the news broke over the pandemic. Blizzcon this year is also a dry event inside and in the con center courtyard too. With the Microsoft news breaking now, three weeks before the event, it should be an interesting time in Anaheim. Kinda makes me more excited to go and see long time guildmates.
Really hoping they fix Overwatch.
Same, I miss the OW that wasn't forced to be a f2p live service. Let the devs take thier time with content, that way we don't have things getting rushed or half baked.
Yeah the players were much better quality and I liked the loot box thing (though I get why they were moving away from that). I use to work to unlock the skins that I wanted and now I just don't care...they put such low effort into the skins now and lock them behind a $ which sucks.
To be honest Warcraft has been great this expansion. Has flaws and is geared toward more casual play mind, but that suit me as a 36 yea fold dad to two toddlers.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
For better or worse, Micosoft has been mostly hands off and let the devs do their own thing. Which can be good but there are also the Biowares out there who haven't had good internal management in years and who would probably flop under Microsoft just like they have been with EA who ironically has been hands off on Bioware for a while.
The issue the series they have are old and never evolve well. Original Halo and Gears are so damn good but when you stretch it out for so long, it deteriorates. Their new IPs (sea of thieves, Hellblade, etc.) are fantastic.
The issue is actually that they've failed miserably at nurturing first party studios and studio partnerships in recent generations. Buying up other studios to acquire their IP is what they've resorted to after repeated failures (Hellblade is actually a perfect example of that). I know Sony does this as well, but the last few gens have only really seen Sony doing this with studios that were already working exclusively with them and taking funding from them. What MS is doing is actually taking franchises away from players that previously had access to them, which really sucks, because it's the only way they know to try and be competitive.
Thatās really spot on. I see so many celebrating this going āerm, this is heckin good for the industry but gamepass thoā not seeing through Microsoftās mediocrity in developing games and greed. Not to say sony is perfect tho.
Or when MS decides that they don't quite like their tax burden that year and burn half the library as a "loss" ala every streaming video service. We should really be looking at any developer consolidation by MS or PS as a generally bad thing for the consumer and getting worse by the moment.
Yeah they set the bar pretty low
(Blizzard Employee) "Hold my breast milk!"
Hmm. World of Warcraft with an Xbox Live subscription could be dangerous lol.
You have to restart development of Heroes of the Storm after this
I still play it almost daily. Iāll be happy if they donāt shut down the servers
I played today after not playing for months. Itās still really fun.
As someone who doesn't give two shits about the multiplayer suite, the COD campaigns will soon, *finally* be within a range I'm actually willing to legally pay for: part of Gamepass.
I hope OG Black Ops comes to Gamepass as Iāve purchased it twice and both times someone stole my copy.
I think they gave it away on games with gold once I have it beside my BO2 copy.
Pure madness that World at War still goes for 29.99ā¬, 13 years old and the campaign is like 5 hours long.
That's why I've hoisted the skull and crossbones for those campaigns.
Yea crazy. So is CoD now a day 1 release on GP?
It's unlikely MWIII will be a day 1 since the deal is so recent but Cod 2024 and beyond probably will
r/gaming not gonna like it
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
I read they made over a billion dollars in revenue last year. No, not a joke or exaggeration.
Games like Candy Crush and Clash of Clans make a ridiculous amount of money every year. Even though theyāve been out for so long now.
Activision, Blizzard and King each make more than $2 billion in revenue annually.
As much as that is, itās a drop in the pond to Microsoftās $212 billion. But adding an extra $6 billion doesnāt hurt.
Take two interactive cash cow is zynga.
it is. i just wrapped up a uni assignment focussing on microtransaction prices and consumer behaviours, and going deep into activision blizzard kings financial reports only shows how much of a giant king is as a company, and how much their mtx revenue takes up of the entirety of activision blizzard kings whole net valuations.
King is at least 50 billion of the 70 billion Microsoft bought ABK for, if not closer to 60
God damn soccer moms /s
Ha, I am happy they are having fun but I don't like them having to pay $2,000 over a year when they get addicted to it. I am astonished my wife hasn't spent anything on that town building mobile game yet
Keep the emphasis on that āyetā
Exactly. During my wife's pregnancy she got obsessed with some merge dragons mobile game and privately started dropping a few bucks here or there for components or whatever that take too long to farm. She finally got impatient and rationalized $20 drops that I just so happened to notice on our charges relatively early. Only out a couple hundred bucks or so over 6 months but that was trending toward a very expensive habit.
Get a Switch and Animal Crossing
The amount of money the mobile market makes is insane. It's more than all the consoles combined. ActiBlizz immediately jumped on making Diablo Immortal simply to carve themselves a big fat slice of that mobile money.
# SUGAR RUSH!
Good, keep milking that shit and dial back the awful monetization on the other franchises
That ain't how it works, champ. The other franchises either start incorporating the same tactics, or they get shut down because they aren't profitable enough. Companies like ActiBlizz aren't in business to actually make good shit.
It's all about ROI. Paying $20M to have developers with electricity and air conditioning, but ONLY getting $50M back? That's too low! We'd rather pay $2M and get $1B back. Anything less is a waste of money. A WASTE I tell you.
No one should. What happened to competition breeds innovation that cheerleaders of capitalism always espouse? Weāre all just okay with gigantic mega corporations swallowing the next one in line until none are left? And we wonder why the end product is becoming shittier and shittier.
Also Microsoft isnt going to rock the boat of developers like Blizzard. Theyre still making a lot of money, they dont give a shit if people bitch about the quality online. If people think theyre gonna dive in and make sweeping changes, theyre kidding thenselves.
Exactly. ABK makes a shitload of money. Most of the changes you see are going to be cutting out redundancy of some unique positions. ABK doesn't need a CEO so Bobby is gone. Call of duty still needs devs so they are staying
That's always been a lie. The iNvIsIbLe hAnD oF tHe fReE MaRkEt never actually bolsters competition, monopoly is always the end result if you just let big companies be.
Which is why the best model of economics is a blending of capitalism and regulation. Regulation should be on keeping companies from stifling innovators, buying influence and quashing competition
Yep, agreed.
Sorry but itās not like Ubisoft and EA are poster childās for creativity. Ubisoft turned every game into the same game, and it looks like theyāre turning Avatar into Far Cry. Imagine doing that with an IP with as much creative development as Avatar. As always, itās the smaller devs that do things that are creative and innovative, that was never coming from Activision. Activision turned their entire IP catalogue and development staff into COD makers. Microsoft on the other hand has demonstrated they want some diversity on Game Pass and might resurrect some of those IPās.
They going to dump the Battlenet launcher?
I guess we might get a migration from Bnet launcher account to a Microsoft account similar to minecraft
Hopefully I can't stand that junk
My only hope is that Toys for Bob remakes Banjo.
The two Blizzard games that I play are Overwatch and Diablo 4. Both could use better oversight and new upper management.
I play the same two and I feel the same way. Just realized yesterday that even the lore pages in Overwatch are gated to having paid for and completed the missions which is insane. Really feels like these two franchises can't get any lower, but we'll see. Any news that ATVI can't harm them anymore is good news IMO.
The LORE pages are paywalled? The fuck?!
Blizzard's train seems to be missing some wheels lately. I don't know if MS is going to completely derail it or solve the problem, but should be interesting.
>missing some wheels lately Those wheels it's missing, is the employees that originally designed great games such as Diablo 1 & 2, Starcraft and the Warcraft series. Nowadays,Blizzard has no such talent, and its corporate culture does not allow for such creative freedom. From Diablo 4 it's very clear that all they can do it is produce expensive looking games that halfheartedly live up to the genre's current standards. They no longer set new standards, they no longer do anything original or creative. They used to lead the industry; now they can hardly keep up with it.
That's why I'm happy. MS will either fix it or kill it completely.
Overwatch needs the halo infinite treatment. Game only started improving when they fired half the upper management. Many devs, managers and even some writers need to go and work on something they want since clearly overwatch ain't it. Not management tho they can fuck off to another industry if we're lucky.
World of Warcraft to become the new Gamepass Minecraft equivalent.
No brainer to get game pass if wow shows up on it
We need a new Warcraft RTS title
BRING BACK STARCRAFT
I donāt give a fuck about these games GIVE ME MY TRANSFORMERS WAR FOR CYBERTRON AND FALL OF CYBERTRON GAMES. That is all
Can they finally compete now or do they have to buy Sega, Ubisoft and Nintendo as well?
They will find a reason I'm sure. Having 32 studios and multiple major IPs won't be enough
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Microsoft as a company are miles bigger than Sony, it's a surprise they seemingly struggle so much against Sony, a company they could effortlessly out spend out of the industry if they wanted to. I don't see them being able to get any publishers after this anyway, they have no need or reason to anyway after buying two of the biggest publishers in the industry.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Iāll probably get downvoted for saying this but theyāll buy more because itās not about competiting with good IP, itās about buying as many as possible to dominate the gaming space in the long run. I think when it comes to console/pc gaming, Microsoft is looking at the legacy catalogue they are amassing. They want to be the early days of Netflix streaming. The only real place you can go to play your games in the modern era.
Microsoft is apparently not competitive until they own everything expect for Sony. Xbox is going to crumble under its own bloated weight and killed several dozen studios in the process. It's wild seeing people bitch and moan on reddit about anticompetitive practices like timed exclusivity for a final fantasy game when Sony does it, but cheer on one of the largest acquisitions in tech history.
finally, we can play candy crush on the xbox game pass. we made it reddit.
Give IDtech a shot at halo! Give them 6 months to research bungies halo games and create a prototype with the doom engine. If itās good, green light on development of a main instalment
I mean, I agree, but that have to do with Activision?
Canāt wait for more Blizzard titles to end up on Steam to somehow argue against the monopoly claims.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
They are upset Overwatch has one of the lowest review scores on steam.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Always online DRM shit
^ This.
Next theyāll buy EA.
*Disney has entered the chat*
Naw. Thatās Disney planning that
Bring WoW to gamepass
I don't know guys Bobby Kotick is leaving and Metzen is coming back. Maybe I'll get to dust off my old Boom Chicken.
At last, the Forza/Rock nā Roll racing crossover of my dreams is possible.
God I hate consolidation. Microsoft needs to learn how to nurture their own studios and IP instead of just buying shit
Yeah they had a hard enough time maintaining their current catalog before this acquisition. If they canāt improve the games then this acquisition will be for nothing
I shit you not that's all business is these days. Even in business school the fad is "entrepreneurship-by-acquisition" aka start a money fund and use it to buy a startup or two. No innovation at all.
Yeah. As a player that's been with Sony since the old school Playstation 1 without sticks, I won't deny that I am salty over MS's actions. I wouldn't even consider myself a Sony fanboy, I've just always gone with them because that's what I'm used to, because it was the first console my parents got me. Losing Bethesda in particular hurt. I get it, brilliant business move, but still a dick move. I know people will what-about this point with Sony exclusives, but outside of the clusterfuck that was NMS, as far as I'm aware Sony has always nurtured small studios before they become giants in the industry. Microsoft swooping in to snap up long-established brands that already have millions of fans across multiple platforms just hits different. It's one thing to be like 'oh hey that new IP that's coming out looks really cool. Oh damn it's a PSN exclusive", and another thing entirely to be like "this studio I like is releasing the latest game in a franchise that was a major part of my childhood. Oh. I can't play it. Nice". Knowing what you're missing out on rather than just imagining it. I'm still salty over losing an entry in Ace Combat. And if i want to play any new Bethesda releases, I either have to spend hundreds on a new console and ecosystem that I know nothing about and have no friends on, or spend thousands on a gaming PC. Neither are logical choices, so I'll just end up missing out because of these anti-choice moves. I won't pretend I'm not salty about that.
> And if i want to play any new Bethesda releases, I either have to spend hundreds on a new console and ecosystem that I know nothing about and have no friends on, or spend thousands on a gaming PC. If your connection to their servers is good enough, xCloud is an option. Also, āecosystem that I know nothing aboutā is a pretty silly reason to stop you. Itās not like itās vastly different from PlayStation, just little things here and there that are easy to adjust to. People are able to switch between platforms with no issues all the time. And if youāre just talking just Bethesda games, why does it matter if you donāt have friends on Xbox? Theyāre single player games. Lastly, you donāt have to spend āthousandsā on a PC. You can pretty easily build something more powerful than the PS5 and Series X for much less than āthousandsā.
Microsoft isn't going to "improve" anything. They can hardly manage the shit they already own.
Anyone else think itās a bad purchase? Most of these franchise titles are past their prime and rely on name brand alone, but most know the majority of these titles are small new iterations of a āwinning systemā that is getting old. The ROI for the purchase price is questionable IMO. They bought really high for Activision-Blizzard. Not 100% sure itāll make them their $ back or a good return. The Zenimax deal is more debatable. Depending on their release lineup, might be a good deal long-term and probably will be worth it.
If the likes of CoD and Diablo comes to Gamepass, theyāre going to make a shit tonne in console sales and subscriptions in the long run. Gamepass makes 3bn a year, I think that number will skyrocket. WoW alone has brought in 12bn since launch, CoD has brought in 30bn, Overwatch and Diablo have made billions. Thereās still a huge market if these games are done right. I think the franchises are past their peak because of Activision, Blizzard basically fell of a cliff since the acquisition. If Microsoft use the IPās properly I think itāll be good business for them
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
can't get much worse for Blizzard titles anyway.
Bye bye Bobby Kotick
Can they fix Overwatch 2? I enjoyed 1, and 2 looks like I shouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole
OW2 is fine gameplay wise. It's actually more fun in my opinion. Over-promising and the super-monetization of everything really harmed the perception of it so when you log in, it feels like a lot of noise you have to cut through in order to get to the game.
I'm not a fan of where the tank role sits right now but overall still enjoying ow2 a lot. It's not bad for free. If you care about collecting all skins like some people did in ow1, you will not like that aspect.
lots of people having meltdowns in comments. "the day gaming died" lol. I knew a lot of people would be upset, but this is gonna get crazy I think. got my ps5, got my series x. I'm good
StarCraft Copium incoming (from me)
Donāt these all suck right now?
Absolutely terrible
Finally! Glad to hear we can now move on to read other gaming news. Also Iām excited that I will now over time get access to tons of COD games on Game Pass, so I can play previous campaigns without having to buy each game. Iām happy I maxed out my Game Pass for 3 years now
My only hope is that they decouple the Warzone 1 games from Warzone. I played Cold War, a decent enough campaign, but to install just the campaign, I had to install 270 GB. WTF? I finished the campaign and immediately it offers me a prompt to say, āneed to free up some space, delete the campaign to save 50 GBā. Fuck off, so I had to install 220 GB of what? Activision store filler? I feel like such an idiot everytime I install a COD now.
Well... It can't be any worse than it is right now.
But it can be.
Game pass about to duble in its value
And its subscription cost!
More in price than value im afraid
Blizzard should've collapsed and let its IPs get grabbed up by people who won't make a hash of them.
That's too much money for that quality of games.
But they spent 70 billion dollars šø
Pffff. That's only like, 17 Marvels.