My life for Aiur

En Taro Adun.

Is this a website explaining the website explaining Blizzards acquisition?

They will be now keylogging your gaming behavior. Brace yourselves! xd

"we will totally not make call of duty exclusive to game pass"

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it's pretty easy to explain... the hardware duopoly is ending and they need to own more content if they want to continue making money on gaming

"No more Kotick" would be a pretty fucking big benefit.

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Technically...in Windows 11; they already have that feature they snuck in called "Inking and typing personalization"...

If I recall...the default for this is ON.

edit: https://windowsreport.com/disable-keylogger-windows-11

I dunno...I came for a "saved you a click" recap, myself...

I kinda wished they did that even. I normally play COD for the campaign anyway, so paying a cheap monthly sub to do all the campaigns seems like a good deal to me.

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The safe space for the alt-right, that Blizzard has been, is about to have a big shake up. I’m excited to see the fallout in the next few years.

Pretty sure when mw2 2022 launches they are adding every cod to game pass

Yep, this is it. Only explanation you need.

I see you also have good taste in FPS campaigns. For most of them

What?!?!?!

More like I live in a country where playing COD multiplayer isn't the norm. Not like there are locals I could play against in COD MP. Also Advanced Warfare 1 -2 campaign was just bad.

For something to enjoy for 5-8 hours and be done with, I thought it was alright but I usually end up pirating COD precisely because MP component has no value to me.

Why is the hardware duopoly ending?

Not if they decide to go whine about it in the streets, or across Reddit.

A simple "we want to monopolize" would suffice.

They don’t have much success in the streets now that we know to watch for their Uhaul rentals and they already whine on Reddit.

The stink of a nerd cluster in a hot uhaul would be unbearable. Ass-rot and broken dreams sounds hard to wash out.

This fucking company, man. So sketchy.

Blizzard Activision sucks now. Skeptical it will get any better under Microsoft.

It will be on Game Pass, I think they said that already. It just won't be exclusive to game pass. You can also outright buy it. I also don't think they'll be making the games exclusive to Xbox/PC. Just like they aren't making Bethesda games exclusive to Xbox.

The idea is by getting all these giant publishers content on Game Pass, they can make a service that's a necessity in the games industry.

As soon as the deal was publicised I just knew it wouldn't just go ahead without some speed bumps interrupting things along the way.

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They didn’t buy it to make money?

Steamdeck is a pretty huge improvement in the hardware sphere for gaming, it's paving the way for Linux to become a reliable OS for average users for gaming, when historically it hasn't been.

Microsoft?

Most definitely.

Steam OS may be a contributor, but so is Steam taking over the DRM mess and convincing developers to use wine-compatible DRM systems while also conveniently rolling out Steam Play (Wine, but with some additional setup).

Seriously, the ability to launch a wine-based game straight from my normal launcher is a GAME CHANGER.

Probably the least sketchy major tech company tbh. They mostly deal in data centers, and Xbox is the most consumer friendly console.

They sell your data through windows but that's probs the worst they do.

I very much disagree, but I am mostly focused on how the business progresses. Being the “least sketchy”, that doesn’t make for a just or even acceptable organization. I won’t say they don’t do some things right, because certain parts of the company seem better than others, but man: their business practices are shit, classic American capitalism. Devoid of creativity, which is a part of Microsoft’s legacy, they instead aggressively throw money around and purchase the work of others, claiming it as their own. Theft or a bill of sale, these are the two options they have historically relied upon.

That would be nice, but I'm not sure I'm ready to declare the duopoly over because of the steamdeck.

What gaming company has ever got better under Microsoft?

Excuse my brain fart, I just wanted it on GamePass, not exclusively on it.

Consumer friendly as in you can get a bunch of indies on sub. Plus has a better catalogue, and Sony and Nintendo actually make new and interesting games and IPs. All Microsoft does is buy companies and run them into the ground.

>adding every cod to game pass

Man if they can put all the way back to the OG COD (the WW2 one) that would be swell.

Very true. What they do for gaming as a whole is a net negative. The 360 era was great when they were actually funding creativity. Now they buy companies because their studios are unable to make good games.

That's one way to put it. Obviously, Microsoft is going to save this sinking ship. So they may have to kick out ABK's board after the sale happens.

I would like that as well because the prices to buy them are pretty ridiculous

My thoughts exactly. Thank you for this ✊ On that subject, how Phil Spencer is not seen as extremely suspect, that is beyond me. I wish the gaming portion of the company would truly turn around and, as you so put it, fund and encourage creativity as they once did, rather than holding an unflinching focus on solely the bottom line, but the dollar is manipulative and even some of the “very best” have fallen prey to its appeal. None of this is going to have a positive end result and it’s a shame to watch it happen.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with Phil, just your classic mouthpiece. He doesn’t have the charisma of J Allard though! Bring back allard!!!!

I just want Diablo 2 and 4 as well as overwatch 2 to be part of gamepass.

Game pass absolutely destroys PS plus or any other game service. It's not "a bunch of indies" - every Bethesda game is in there basically, that also means ID games like doom eternal, EA games like battlefield and BioWare RPGs, Forza games, assassins screed odyssey got added recently.

It's pretty clear you have never once even looked at game pass lmao.

https://www.xbox.com/en-CA/xbox-game-pass/games#:~:text=What%20is%20Xbox%20Game%20Pass,always%20something%20new%20to%20play.

Look, I'm. PC gamer. I don't care about your stupid console wars lol. I'm not part of this fanboy shit. Game pass is better, it just is.

That's absolutely not true lol. They bought double fine right as psychonauts 2 came out, that game is amazing. They bought Bethesda right when one of their studios released Deathloop which then won game of the year.

Ur talking out of your ass my dude.

I am a PC gamer, I’ve subscribed to gamepass. I have all consoles, including recently a steamdeck. Lifelong gamer here.

There are roughly 700 games on plus, 400 on gamepass. I personally don’t like much of EAs catalogue, not to mention there’s ubi and EA shit on plus too, and that leaves not much else. Sony catalogue is immense in comparison. You yourself admitted to not even having anything but gamepass.

You just admitted that they basically had 0 input in those games. They bought them. Those games were coming out whether MS bought them or not.

Buying gaming companies does not help the industry unless you fund and improve them. What gaming company has Microsoft EVER improved?

My brother has a ps5 I borrow.

the AAA games on PS plus have basically all either been on game pass or are currently on game pass and it's way cheaper. The only ones they don't have are Sony exclusives.

The ratio of indie games to not indie games is honestly larger on PS plus lol.

Like ya, PS plus is cool too but it's also almost twice as expensive.

Saying shit like "other than the EA games there's nothing" is ignoring 90% of their catalog lol.

Bethesda alone owns ID software and Arkane studios. It's just not "all Indies"

Oh my bad I read that wrong.

Double fine is continuing to do exactly what they did before, now they won't have to do things like crowdfund every one of their games.

I'm not saying they are amazing I'm just saying they aren't any better than Sony.

Sony bought every one of those studios too my dude lol

That’s a fair perspective. The guy just screams suspicious to me. He reminds of a Bond villain, but like a mid trilogy big bad, no starter or ender skills. J Allard does seem cool as all hell, though: with you.

Sony bought studios like naughty dog, guerilla Santa Monica, polyphony etc in the 90s and built them into the industry leaders they are today. That’s the difference. Most modern purchases are companies they have worked extremely closely with throughout like insomniac who were predominantly PlayStation developers until (sunset) or in response to MS trying to buy up the whole gaming landscape (bungie response).

All you have to do is look at their track records, they are not the same at all.

Playground Games, Obsidian Entertainment, Ninja Theory, Mojang Studios, Compulsion Games, probably a few others too.

Playground games is probably the only one I agree with. The list is very very small.

Obsidian peaked with New vegas, way before Microsoft acquisition, ninja theory haven’t really done anything since acquisition as hell blade came out before that. Compulsion again, acquisition too new to really say anything as they release we happy few sequel little after Microsoft bought them.

On the other hand, look at what happened to lion head, ensemble, bizarre, some of the highest talents in gaming at the times and they were Used up and thrown away.

State of decay 2, 4 years later still wing updated by Undead Labs.

I was gonna say Ensemble Studios, but they already had Age of Empires 1 and 2 by the time Microsoft acquired them. Then we got the shit cake that was Age of Empires 3.

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AoM was a fantastic game, though, and the AoE2 HD remake with Steam Workshop support is great.

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Seriously. That has been my absolute minimum red line before i will support blizzard again. His ass gone.

This. People seem to forget that most of the studios that have become part of PlayStation Studios, were at one point independent studios that had very close relationships with Sony, as in doing collaborative creative work. This is the same for Nintendo.

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They are not smaller than Nintendo.

I mean, do we actually have evidence Microsoft is not doing this with their current acquisitions? It's not as if double fine was the biggest studio ever. Minecraft seems to be doing great under Microsoft. The Forza series are great.

Like ya I'll give you the kinect days were rough but they havent given any reason to worry considering the quality of their current first party titles.

They even pulled sea of thieves together.

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Yeah, honestly the only thing keeping me from dropping windows all together is lackluster support for gaming on the current Linux distros.

I'm hoping the steam deck helps drive that support. Guess we'll see!

I still think Microsoft is paying way too much for Activision Blizzard.

Then again, they probably offer that much on purpose to keep companies like Tencent away from them.

The SP campaigns for CoD have always been some of the best. I remember how great CoD2 looked for single player missions back when it was released, too.

CoD are already planning their own subscription service, TBH I'm very surprised it took them this long

They are just buying as much content as they can for their gamepass subscription, increasing their content and blocking others from buying them. Its pretty obvious to see that gamepass subscribers is xbox primary goal right now.

Microsoft are not the good guys here.

Nintendo built their own studios.

Sony created some studios while buying up small indie studios and building them up.

Microsoft just straight out but two of the biggest gaming publishers there is, and they plan on buying more.

You're not gonna get rid of exclusives. You're just going to ensure that Microsoft has all of them. Ironically, this means console hardware is going to get worse because there'll be less competition. as everyone will be choosing Microsoft if they want to play of the thousands of titles they now own.

Sony and Nintendo can't compete in the cloud space and will end up becoming publishers only when streaming becomes mainstream (no pun intended). So hardware is irrelevant but it's pretty clear at this point that Sony always has the best hardware despite relying on exclusives most of the time.

Overwatch 2 is free-to-play.

Isn't Starfield exclusive to Xbox/PC? Or have they announced it will be later released for PS?

Edit: Just in case anybody doesn't know Starfield is Bethesda next big game releasing next year, imagine Skyrim / Fallout but in space, it was originally announced has Xbox / PC only game.

Edit2: From what I can see it is Xbox/PC exclusive with no announcement for PS yet, so yes some Bethesda games are now exclusive.

More shit centralizing under a monopoly, it's depressing.

Decentralize everything.

They are the most sketchy of them all. They created a near monopoly on the computer OS market and the way they viciously try and keep trying to find new ways to make it impossible for competition is insane.

Hopefully the deal goes through and they manage to turn things around inside blizzard, they have been a laughing stock for the past 5 years and I'm not even talking about the whole morality fiesta surrounding their workers

Bro that was in the 90s lol

They exist in an ecosystem where you can put anything you want on your computer, apple is way worse for this.

Someone just launched a Linux based gaming machine, recently a great API called vulkan came out that isn't made by Microsoft and it's slowly picking up speed with some very major games being made on it. What did microsoft do to stop any of that?

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lol if anything game pass will eventually be so good that buying a PlayStation won't make sense anymore. This is Microsoft's end goal, they're bleeding money with it to get rid of Sony. Next gen the Xbox will be the popular console, and the next one there won't be a PS7. Add to this that Microsoft has the engineering to add all the old catalogues.

This is something Sony simply can't compete against.

Oh man, so many people angry. I liok forward to seeing if Microsoft can revitalize what Kotick and his greedy followers fucked up.

Starcraft 3 confirmed

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I’m just talking about their track record. The past says no. Not much to go on with their recent acquisitions. But let’s look at their bread and butter, Halo infinite is an absolute shambles. We’re on whatever season now and the game still has no content , no coop and the stories of outsourced developing is a joke.

You mean the game by 343, the studio Microsoft gave multiple chances and multiple extensions plus a massive budget too to make what should have been a slam dunk?

I don't really see how that's Microsofts fault.

What about Minecraft? It's been continuously updated, gotten spinoff games and maybe movies I can't remember. It remains a titan of the gaming industry under Microscoft owned Mojang.

Flight sim is arguably the best looking game ever made and clearly had a pretty large budget even tho it's a niche sim game. (Tho, Microsoft doesn't own asobo.. yet.. somehow)

They continued to fund sea of thieves after a rocky launch and it's great now.

Grounded has been largely developed under Microsoft and just came out with rave reviews.

And again, both Forza and Forza Motorsport are amazing not to mention Turn 10 is making the next Fable game now..

Like ya during the kinect games before Phil Spencer they were trash to their studios but they have been making bangers now, and when double fine sold to them Tim Chaffer even said they intended to be mostly hands off. Their current track record is great.. their biggest fuck up is perfect dark.

i find it so disturbing that ms will force me to log into games using the same ms account i have for windows. they literally suspend accounts that arent using that account. how crazy is that? hardcore forced spying.

There’s more to owning video game companies than throwing money at them. You don’t think the owner of the company is responsible for what they output?

Minecraft was a cashcow when they bought it, nothing incredible has come from Minecraft since it’s inception. People like Minecraft, kids love it. You could release a turd and slap Minecraft on it and it would do well.

Flight sim is great if you are into that sort of thing but it isn’t relevant here, as you said yourself MS don’t even own them. Outside talent.

Sea of thieves is alright, I played it a bit a few years ago but it certainly isn’t Rare’s magnum opus. I mean it’s a 5 year old game now…. Why are we even still talking about it.

Forza is the exception, great games and I love the spin-offs. Truly the only studio to thrive under MS imo.

Not more depressing than woman being abused at work being normalized, lesser of 2 evils here

I'm waiting on the comment that explains the website explaining the website explaining the Act/Blizz acquisition.

They can still add it to game pass without making it exclusive.

That’d be like Netflix letting you watch Prime Video through their app, not gonna happen.

Not happy with him getting a huge payout from this deal, but fuck that dude, he needs to leave, now.

If its only the owners fault how come EA releases fun games sometimes

For real, MS aren't just buying a studio, they are buying franchises and IP. There is going to be a major restructuring and it will be interesting to see what they start to put out in the years following.

Talking about a specific franchise. Microsoft had Halo, arguably one of the best FPS franchises. I loved halo 2 and 3 , even reach. It’s Microsoft’s fault that this franchise has gone to shit. They choose who works on the game, they created 343, so any mismanagement and lack of staff is their fault.

Comparing some companies within EA to 343 a studio created by Microsoft, not really comparable.

"So we saw your boss was pro sexual harassment and our first thought was, wow I bet we could buy them for cheaper now and expand our oligarchy."

Look the steamdeck is cool and all but it has sold 1M copies, its too soon to call the duopoly dead

So, when do we get Windows of Warcraft?

Monopolies are always fun.

This ain’t gonna save anything. Blizzard and activision have been dog shit for years , Microsoft is dog shit to. Monopolies are not a good thing.

TL DR -- We will give Bobby Kotick a golden parachute for his services of protecting sexual abusers that resulted in one of the victims dying ( including himself) and he will have a fuck ton of money . There it is , saved you a click .

I feel like there's a solution that doesn't involve monopolies nor women being abused/harassed.

What evidence do you have that they are bleeding money? Xbox division revenue has been extremely high, but I can't find any sources that show net income. I'm not sure your assumption they are bleeding money is accurate. Do you have data to back that up? Curious...

Since when did we have a duopoly?

I know Nintendo and PC aren't strictly seen as competing with XBox or PS, but realistically they are very comparable. At least enough that fans of Microsoft and Sony could switch to a different system entirely if they had reason to.

Only one that has been bad from what I’ve heard is 343 even though they have Xbox’s flagship exclusive title

They want wow on xbox. Only explanation.

take a look at what samsung is doing with their TVs.. they keep putting smarter and smarter chips in them.

in 5 years, consoles will have gone the way of the Cable TV set top box. they're just not necessary anymore.

Ugh, I don’t know if that’s good news or not… still, when Diablo gets on there and they have their $1 for 3 months deal I can power through both games and be done with them.

As long as Steam pushes to use primarily libraries that other distros can get (meaning avoiding proprietary packages), I'm good with that.

Those who have never used linux are always worried about which distro to support (completely missing that usually supporting any means the community can usually port really easily)

I have returned.

how's that going for crypto

Hmm guess irl is closer to satire than I thought. In all seriousness, why wouldn't Microsoft want to make all their games exclusive

Microsoft explanation: "We like the stock"

For me, very well. Watch it rise.

343 wasn't acquired. They were built by Microsoft as the Halo studio.

Their management sucks though. They've made some games that were a few better decisions away from being good games.

I guess I don’t really care what brands are owned by which companies. A company is just a front door. Behind each door is the exact same pool of global capital. Does it matter which representation of that pool holds what? The investors in entertainment software are diversified and have a single goal: produce profits. That’s it.

When it comes to gaming platforms/services it’s either “Wall Street” owns it or Gabe Newell owns it. Trying to tease apart “Wall Street” into discrete entities is a fruitless distraction for consumers.

I used to think monopolies don't have consequences, but they do. Just look at the world today, with all the poverty and despair, our laws skewed to benefit the rich only, our Healthcare costs monstrous, our food system controlled by just 5 conglomerates, our money centrally controlled and held by the big banks.

With regards to Microsoft's purchase of Activision, it again, one company controlling the vast market, thus limiting our choices, censoring ideas, sucking our pockets empty with constant new pay schemes, and deciding our choices based on what they believe is good for us.

The film The Matrix comes to mind, with the robots holding society hostage in the virtual world.

It may sound fantastical, but just look at the state of the world today, so out of sync with humanity, animals, and the planet. If monopolies continue to gobble up every valuable ip in the world, we are definitely headed toward darker times.

They would be risking being broken up if they did that and it may reduce their game brands value. If MS owns Activision but CoD is still available on PS then Sony effectively takes some of the burden of marketing MS's products as they need to show off the games to sell Playstations. Profit on B2B tech tends to be much higher than B2C so it wouldn't surprise me if MS make bank selling Azure cloud services to the gaming division.

I guess I would challenge if the horrors of the modern world have anything to do with acquisition or, rather that a small(ish) group of people own all these companies regardless of what brand is on what balance sheet today. Even if it isn’t the same individuals, the fiduciary response of ALL public companies means they will act in very similar ways. The name on the shingle or the brand doesn’t mean a thing.

Interesting. How do you profit from azure if you own all the games? (It would be paying yourself I think?)

They would be paying themselves but this way they get to force CoD to use Azure services rather than another host like AWS.

This is so stupid, they didn't need to do this.

Imagine how many websites Disney would have to make.

No white people in the pictures on that webpage. Such diversity.

Why would this not be a direct link to the website?

I see. I just don't understand why they'd pay $60B for that.

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The last Bethesda game playstation got was already in development at the time of acquisition. All future announced Bethesda games are exclusive to Microsoft software. The last game playstation will get is deathloop.