Microsoft now owns Crash Bandicoot

[Dark Jaguar]

And Spyro, and Lost Vikings, and Starcraft, and King's Quest, and Pitfall...

[Dark Jaguar]

So much to think about here...

Bobby Kotick is being directly rewarded for the horrible things he did and the culture he encouraged in that company.  I mean this.  This purchase didn't happen without what happened to the stock.  The bad publicity we fostered has directly encouraged this behavior in other CEOs once they see just how well Kotick is going to profit from all this.  It will be the most wonderous and dream fulfilling "firing" anyone could even conceive of.  He hurt employees and women in particular, and his every wish is being fulfilled as a result.  To put it another way, karma itself is rewarding him for his evil by having all of his joys come true at once.  Those he wronged will be all the worse off when he's gone.  This is... a miserable world we live in, isn't it?  Even our efforts to hold him accountable have only ENABLED this, indirect though the cause and effect may be, they are inextricably linked.

Meanwhile, this singular purchase totally 10x the price Pixar or Lucasarts or Marvel cost Disney to buy.  No, this is "Buying Fox itself" money.  The end result?  Whatever you may think of Microsoft, especially these days, they have "won".  I don't mean they won the console wars.  I mean they won on a meta level.  They won the gaming industry now and extended for decades to come.  The console wars are nothing to this behemoth.  One console may fail and another succeed, and it matters not to this cosmic being roaming among the lessers like Sony and Nintendo.  They are "above" that now.  A few failed console generations can't bankrupt them any more, or even come close to it.

The next purchase is nigh.  It'll take someone playing in MS's court to do it, but someone is going to end up buying EA.  That'll be it then.

[A Black Falcon]

So much to think about here...

Bobby Kotick is being directly rewarded for the horrible things he did and the culture he encouraged in that company.  I mean this.  This purchase didn't happen without what happened to the stock.  The bad publicity we fostered has directly encouraged this behavior in other CEOs once they see just how well Kotick is going to profit from all this.  It will be the most wonderous and dream fulfilling "firing" anyone could even conceive of.  He hurt employees and women in particular, and his every wish is being fulfilled as a result.  To put it another way, karma itself is rewarding him for his evil by having all of his joys come true at once.  Those he wronged will be all the worse off when he's gone.  This is... a miserable world we live in, isn't it?  Even our efforts to hold him accountable have only ENABLED this, indirect though the cause and effect may be, they are inextricably linked.

This is kind of true, but kind of not.  I mean, it seems clear that the reason why this happened is because of Microsoft taking advantage of Activision-Blizzard's share price going down because of their serious harassment scandals.  First the share price goes down, then MS pounces and offers an amount of money that pre-scandal would not have been enough.  Kotick decided to accept after looking around for better offers and not finding one.

Is this Kotick's every dream?  Probably not; he probably wanted to continue being CEO of a major company, as he has been for over 30 years now, you know?  Being a subsidiary of a massive corporation's not quite the same, I doubt this was his dream.  And particularly not for less money then he could have gotten before. 

You are right that he will come out of this ahead, though.  He will get tens or hundreds of millions of dollars from this, and though he is already a billionaire so I don't know what he'll do with even MORE money, he's certainly the type to at least like that part of it.

Meanwhile, this singular purchase totally 10x the price Pixar or Lucasarts or Marvel cost Disney to buy.  No, this is "Buying Fox itself" money.  The end result?  Whatever you may think of Microsoft, especially these days, they have "won".  I don't mean they won the console wars.  I mean they won on a meta level.  They won the gaming industry now and extended for decades to come.  The console wars are nothing to this behemoth.  One console may fail and another succeed, and it matters not to this cosmic being roaming among the lessers like Sony and Nintendo.  They are "above" that now.  A few failed console generations can't bankrupt them any more, or even come close to it.

The next purchase is nigh.  It'll take someone playing in MS's court to do it, but someone is going to end up buying EA.  That'll be it then.

There are probably a few companies that can at least come pretty close to matching Microsoft's money, but not many.  Has MS won?  Well, buying Bethesda and Activision sure is a major play towards "winning", yes.  They haven't put Sony out of business, but if they make most of Activision's games MS platform exclusive they will seriously damage Sony, that much is obvious.  And Sony does not have the money to compete, not unless they get bought by one of the other giant tech companies.  Consolidation continues.

And that's the big question here, on the continuing consolidation in the videogame industry.  It is something that has been happening for some time, as the Embracer Group and Tencent buy small to midsized developers left and right while Microsoft buys large publishers, and it's a pretty significant issue now.  I think it shows several things, but most importantly, that development costs keep increasing.  As development costs for AAA games keep going up and up and up, companies need more and more ways to make money to pay for development.  And selling to an even larger company with more revenue streams is one way to do that.  More microtransactions and gatcha is another way, subscription services are a way, and raising the price of games is as well.  Or, more likely, most to all of those things.  Because the goal of a company is to make money and increase their profits over time.  This is of course not infinitely possible, but they'll try as hard as they can to pretend that it is. 

The other major thing the consolidation shows is that while there has been massive consolidation, it is not yet to the point of convincing governments to take action to stop it, and this almost certainly won't change that.  Companies also naturally consolidate over time, unless governments act to force competition by trust-breaking.  I don't think the game industry has gotten to the point of governments breaking up the big companies, but as more and more small developers are bought by larger ones, and large developers by even larger ones, we may get to that point eventually... unless the government doesn't care and would be fine with only a handful of companies running the whole industry, small indies aside.  We are heading towards that future.  But given how most industries in this country now are run by only a few companies -- think of how few companies own most American food products, and such -- expecting government action is probably pretty unlikely.  There was antitrust action against Microsoft once, of course, but I don't think that just buying Bethesda and Activision gets them back to that point of dominance; Xbox is, right now, still a third-place platform, after all.

On another note, Microsoft now owns a pretty stunning amount of PC gaming history's back catalog, and I hope they do good things with it.  I like Microsoft reasonably well enough and have an Xbox Series X and an okay (if now dated) PC.  They do have monopolistic tendencies, but also currently have pretty good backwards compatibility and gaming history policies and have great platforms, and pretty good games too.  Of Activision-Blizzard's possible purchasers -- and very few companies can afford $60 billion! --  Microsoft buying them probably is the least bad option.  If it had been Facebook, or Apple, or Google, or Amazon, I think things would be much worse... but still, it is unfortunate that this is the future we are in now, where only the giants survive in this industry and smaller developers are going extinct.  Having a larger variety of publishers making games made things more interesting and led to more variety than you get when it's mostly just from a couple of companies.  But between natural capitalistic consolidation and skyrocketing costs, those days are ending.  I like Microsoft and greatly dislike Sony, but if MS does actually win by just buying most of the major publishers?  That's not really how you want to win... but oh well, that's capitalism.

Of course, MS probably doesn't want to actually put Sony out of business, THAT might interest the antitrust lawyers... they just want them weakened.  So they probably would not buy literally everyone even if they could.

[Dark Jaguar]

The only reason it's "not yet to the point of convincing governments to stop it" is because antitrust lawsuits against major corporations have, largely, STOPPED.  MS is doing WAY worse things than bundling IE with Windows these days, but that slap on the wrist they got in the 90's isn't looking like it could even possibly happen.  Our government is subserviant to these giants.

MS is an eldritch god, ancient and terrible.

It's time ABF, for you to put away childish things like thinking the justice department is actually swayed by "justice".  It's swayed by political leanings.  Crushing Sony isn't going to "bring the antitrust lawyers".  Nothing "brings" them except political pressure any more, and THAT is not going to happen with our current crop of politicians.  Do you honestly think anyone in congress or the white house cares if some Japanese corporation goes out of business or gets eaten up by an American one?  If anything, they'd WELCOME it.

[etoven]

Here's the irony.. Ready?

I run all those games on linux..
Every last one.

[Dark Jaguar]

And in some sort of retaliation, Sony now owns Bungie.  Too bad MS kept Halo after Bungie left.  Ooooh so close.

In any case, Sony's purchase is off by an order of magnitude.  Buying what amounts to the Destiny series comes nowhere close to what MS has managed to acquire.

[A Black Falcon]

Yeah, that one's weird.  I mean, Sony bought Bungie!  That's kind of a big deal, Bungie is fairly important.  It was a $3.6 billion dollar deal, exactly.

However... apparently, Bungie will NOT be Playstation-exclusive.  The studio will apparently not be under the Playstation division of Sony, it will be separate, and they expressly said that Bungie will continue making games for all platforms including rival consoles.  So, Sony spent $3.6 billion to continue making Xbox games?  Uh... okay.  Maybe Destiny 2 makes enough revenues to make this make sense from a financial sense, because Bungie has a huge live-service game and Sony wants more of that, but otherwise it's kind of weird, you know?  Microsoft usually doesn't buy studios and then have them keep making Playstation games, after all.  Minecraft is the one exception there.  I guess this is more like Minecraft in that respect than MS's other purchases.  Odd.

The only reason it's "not yet to the point of convincing governments to stop it" is because antitrust lawsuits against major corporations have, largely, STOPPED.  MS is doing WAY worse things than bundling IE with Windows these days, but that slap on the wrist they got in the 90's isn't looking like it could even possibly happen.  Our government is subserviant to these giants.

The deal is highly unlikely to be blocked because it does not create a monopoly in any sense of the word, but apparently the government is going to be looking into the Microsoft-Activision deal.  Some scrutiny should be expected, considering that Biden put a fairly big-company-mergers-skeptical team in charge, much more so than we had had for some time.  There are several other large mergers that are probably not going to happen, largely because of regulator scrutiny, such as NVidia's attempt to purchase ARM.  (Though that one is not just a US thing, ARM is British.)

That comic is amusing, but exaggerates slightly.  Microsoft has a lot of money, but not enough to buy the entire industry if they wanted to... heh.  I think I've read that this deal will use up half of Microsoft's cash on hand.  Of course they make more of that every year, but still.

[Dark Jaguar]

ABF, it leads closer and closer to a monopoly, and in the past, that was enough.  They used to break up companies for far less.

If you don't think that what MS is doing, and in a bigger sense what Disney HAS been doing, is monopolistic, I don't know what you consider a monopoly.  Are we supposed to blithely accept every last step on the way towards a monopoly except for that very last merger at the very end of the chain, or should we, perhaps, recognize a trend and cut it off before it reaches that desperate point?  What exactly do you think anti-monopoly laws are for?

Sony can say all they want.  You may not have read it, but MS said exactly the same things about their acquisition of both Zenimax and Activision Blizzard.  They ALSO claimed that they'd let "certain" series stay multiplatform, such as the Calls of Duties.  It might even be true for a little bit.  But that's the thing, they're lying.  Sony is ALSO lying.  It's just not immediately obvious that they did.  At best, what they've promised is that the games that these companies already released on multiple consoles will not be retroactively pulled from said consoles and their online services will remain up.  That's... not the most convincing thing.  MS and Sony "aren't running a charity here!", to quote 90's business villains.  If you don't believe they have every intention of reneging on their words in a few years, you're naïve.

[A Black Falcon]

ABF, it leads closer and closer to a monopoly, and in the past, that was enough.  They used to break up companies for far less.

It's not a monopoly by any possible definition of the term, though.  It is industry consolidation.  Studios are being bought left and right by larger studios, and larger studios are being bought by ones even larger than that.  After this purchase Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly on anything.  We seem to be heading towards an oligarchy or such though, as only a handful of companies will own everything...

If you don't think that what MS is doing, and in a bigger sense what Disney HAS been doing, is monopolistic, I don't know what you consider a monopoly.  Are we supposed to blithely accept every last step on the way towards a monopoly except for that very last merger at the very end of the chain, or should we, perhaps, recognize a trend and cut it off before it reaches that desperate point?  What exactly do you think anti-monopoly laws are for?

Don't you need to control an entire industry, have total control of things in a region, or such, for something to be a monopoly?  I don't understand your definition of monopoly, when after the sale there will still be other companies selling similar products in the same field.

That said, I fully support the government taking a look at the deal, it's a MASSIVE deal and any deal that huge deserves regulatory oversight.

Sony can say all they want.  You may not have read it, but MS said exactly the same things about their acquisition of both Zenimax and Activision Blizzard.  They ALSO claimed that they'd let "certain" series stay multiplatform, such as the Calls of Duties.  It might even be true for a little bit.  But that's the thing, they're lying.  Sony is ALSO lying.  It's just not immediately obvious that they did.  At best, what they've promised is that the games that these companies already released on multiple consoles will not be retroactively pulled from said consoles and their online services will remain up.  That's... not the most convincing thing.  MS and Sony "aren't running a charity here!", to quote 90's business villains.  If you don't believe they have every intention of reneging on their words in a few years, you're naïve.

While somewhat similar, the language of the two is different.  Sony's language isn't vague, like Microsoft's.  It is clear and straightforward.
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2...vice-games
"Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan says that Destiny 2 and future Bungie games will continue to be published on other platforms, including rival consoles."

Microsoft never said anything like that after buying Bethesda or Activision-Blizzard.  They didn't say "all games by these studios will be Microsoft platform exclusive", but they did NOT say anything as clear as Sony's statement there.  They said that games currently planned for other platforms would continue to be on those platforms, but said nothing about future games.  After learning Starfield will be exclusive, people knew for sure what this means: with very few exceptions future games will be exclusives, only the ones already contracted to be on Sony systems will be on Playstation.

Now, Call of Duty Warzone (the live service spinoff) may continue to be made for Playstation, joining Minecraft as something Microsoft makes for everything, but in a few years we probably will see a main-line COD game not release on Playstation.

Now, does that mean that there won't be Sony-exclusive games from Bungie at some point in the future, no, of course that could happen.    But it sounds like Bungie is getting significant independence; the focus seems more on Sony getting live service game experience and revenues, and Bungie having an easier way to make more cross-media things based on their games.  Sony owns movie and TV studios and such, after all.

[Dark Jaguar]

Again, don't trust a thing Sony says.  They're not legally obligated to their words, because all it was was an empty promise to fans.  Nothing more.  Unless those words are directly attached to a sale to someone, legally it's not "false advertising".

In any case, my definition of a monopoly works like so very many things these days.  It's not a binary "is or isn't" thing, it's a sliding scale, with "less monopolistic" on one end and "more monopolistic" on the other.  I've found over the years that granularity is far more useful when defining words than binary definitions are.  For example: Gender, sexuality, wealth.

With a more granular definition, it becomes downright easy to call this industry consolidation "more monopolistic".

[A Black Falcon]

So MS now is saying how they'll totally keep Call of Duty and major Blizzard titles on Playstation, and are "interested in" having them on Switch as well.  Speculation is that they are trying to make sure regulators, who, again, in the Biden administration are skeptical on big mergers, approve the merger.  Can they say one thing and then totally change their tune after it's approved, perhaps, but that would look really bad.

And of course, Sony's saying the same stuff at the same time about their purchase of Bungie.  So either we are in for a weird new age where both major publishers make games on the other platform, or both are lying and are going to do that for a while but change once the mergers are past the point of no return.  I guess we'll see, but the quest for more revenues does seem to suggest that maybe they aren't lying?  I mean, a customer on your platform is more ideal of course, but both want more money and you can potentially get more money by having a larger audience (depending on a lot of factors, of course).

Strange times...

[Dark Jaguar]

Here's the best case scenario: They do EXACTLY what you hope they do and what they say they'll do, realize how much more profitable it is to sell games on every platform, and then ask a singular question.  "Can't we save even more money only developing one version of our games?"  Then, console generations will become standardized.  The PS5 and the XBox Series are both x86 machines already, fundamentally.  Heck, The XBox since the One literally just runs Windows 10 as it's OS (in a locked kiosk mode, but it IS otherwise the same fully functional Windows 10).  Sony runs their own proprietary OS, but the day may come they give up on that in their slow failure to keep up with the features of XBox's OS (which again, is Windows 10).  Sony may instead embrace Linux as their OS, and at that point all MS needs to do is further their support of Linux in Windows 10.  The next gen may very well see one version of every game and you can just plug it into a Sony box or a Windows square and it'll just work.  Got a PC?  Stick it in your PC's game hole and it'll work there too.

That's the best case.  It'll lead to massively increased profits for both companies since they're selling those consoles at a loss anyway, but both of those companies do love their control, and tradition.  They may not be willing to do it.

Meanwhile Nintendo will ignore whatever they do.

[Dark Jaguar]

Activision Blizzard just released some kind of tabletop stat hexagon for how "progressive" each of their characters are along multiple axis.  What the hell?  I feel insulted along multiple axis.

[Dark Jaguar]

You cannot and SHOULD not even attempt to reduce entire peoples down to an algorithm or any sort of system.  Just... be human?

Here's what Tycho had to say about it:

The Diversity Space Tool is an instrument created by Satan to corral and commodify human richness, and one of the fascinating things about it is that it's almost universally loathed. People don't agree on shit, and they agree on this. It's a very Fallout, "everybody hated that" type situation. Of chief importance is that it's hated by the people they pretended to serve. The request was not "make a piece of software that reduces the panoply of Earth's peoples and cultures into geometric shapes," the request was "please listen to us. Please allow us to be co-equal participants in the manufacture and experience of culture."
This is why I wouldn't trust corporate allyship any further than you can throw it. Inventing digital phrenology is an utterly predictable maneuver; "diversity" becomes just another KPI, and as such, it must be systematized. Which means abstraction from reality, which is to say, greater alienation. That they manufactured this shit is an indictment; that they revealed it with such revolting, unctuous piety is beyond conception.

Sterling has also injected a rather obvious point.  What does it mean to be "more ethnic" on this dial?  More "gender"?  We all know what it means if you're right in the center.  White English speaking male.  The chart itself is used to indicate how much of an aberration someone is from the cultural norm, and if you as an A-B employee managed to get something really aberrant, good jorb!  You did an equality!

No...