Microsoft To Acquire Activision Blizzard

[smirky]

$69 billion in ... cash. Imagine trucks full of $100 banknotes. OMG. I'm joking of course, it's gonna be electronic transactions between bank accounts most likely. Corporations have become larger than many countries.

The GDP of my country in 2020 is exactly 69$ billion. Not gonna lie, I feel sad about both these facts.

[amxfonseca]

"We bought it so we can fix it. You know, like Skype."

Maybe different times?

If we look at recent acquisitions like GitHub the experience is quite the opposite. Github improved quite a lot.

[aufkrawall]

and I really hope they will drop an abomination called Battle.net.

Why would you want something that stupid? It's still 1000x better than Microsoft spaghetti code store and Blizzard games don't have stupid kernel anti-cheat and thus run fine in Wine. Not that I'm fan of Blizzard (anymore), but still...

[OneTimeShot]

I’m pretty sure the limitations are “how much money a game can make”. If games only release on XBox, they will make less money than if they release everywhere.

MS buying everything can only create a temporary imbalance in the market. Other independent companies will take their place.

[spykes]

Why would you want something that stupid? It's still 1000x better than Microsoft spaghetti code store and Blizzard games don't have stupid kernel anti-cheat and thus run fine in Wine. Not that I'm fan of Blizzard (anymore), but still...

I would easily trade Battle.net launcher for a Steam release of their games. I don't really care if they end up in MS store or their Game Pass as well.

[brad0]

"The bar's so low even we couldn't screw it up"
-Microsoft, probably

It's Microsoft.. they can screw up everything. The incompetence is incredible.

[SlickMcRunfast]

Lets hope this MS's buyout spree is only to combat Tencent and not to form some kind of monopoly. Next gen playstation isn't looking so good, maybe this is why Sony is selling their games on steam.

[jeoshua]

Lets hope this MS's buyout spree is only to combat Tencent and not to form some kind of monopoly. Next gen playstation isn't looking so good, maybe this is why Sony is selling their games on steam.

Let's see. They bought up Minecraft and Zenimax already, gaining them Bethesda and iD, now they're coming for Activision/Blizzard. They have Windows which is installed on almost 99% of PCs, and through various means make it basically impossible for companies to sell computers with a choice of either Windows or some other OS. There was that whole lawsuit years ago where they were supposed to have been broken up into smaller companies then found a way around that in appeals court.

I don't think you have to worry about them trying to create a monopoly. That's already basically occurred.

[piotrj3]

Why would you want something that stupid? It's still 1000x better than Microsoft spaghetti code store and Blizzard games don't have stupid kernel anti-cheat and thus run fine in Wine. Not that I'm fan of Blizzard (anymore), but still...

neither does minecraft/age of empires/forza/ (and i think Halo?) MS games are availiable on steam and also are not reliant on kernel anti-cheat. Meanwhile tons of activision games do run stupid anti cheats.

[geearf]

Normally I'd be dead against this. But the state of Blizzard right now means it's probably a good thing, as long as MS gets rid of the top few levels of management across the board. Blizzard is not what it used to be, but I think MS will be a better steward than Activision. It won't bring Blizzard back to it's heyday, but it's better than the current status quo.

Sucks for PlayStation users who want to play CoD, but ho hum, them's the breaks.

Is there a point in trying to save Blizzard now? All the key people that brought us amazing games left.

It is scary though how big MS Games is becoming, so many old favorites are now owned by them.