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Microsoft interested in buying Warner Bros' gaming unit
- jarjoura 6y agoOh good, Microsoft can spit out faster Halo and Gears of War spinoffs.
- albatross13 6y ago#rekt
- excalibur 6y agoOnly on Xbox Series X: Mortal Kombat: Nuts & Bolts
- dyingkneepad 6y agoMortal Kombat as an Xbox exclusive would kill the franchise for me :(
- BlahGod420 6y agoNooooooo
- techntoke 6y agoMicrosoft cares so much about racism they going to be installing games by default in their proprietary OS but won't include quality educational content.
- DevKoala 6y agoWB's gaming unit makes okay games that become successful due to the weight of the media franchises in which they are based. You take Batman away from the Arkham City games and you end up with a game not many people want to play. For example, the Mad Max game was their best open world entry, but it failed to reach sales expectations due to the lack of appeal of the media property. I have no idea of what it takes to run a massive game studio like the one Microsoft has, but I can judge their games output, and outside of Halo and Forza, there is nothing for me there. I don't have much faith in them, and this seems like the kind of bad opportunity they'd pursue.
- pm90 6y agoI'm not sure I agree on the Batman Arkham series assessment. Those games received very favorable reviews (Arkham Asylum was named Game of the Year, GOTY). The style influenced another incredible series: Middle Earth, Shadow of Mordor (another GOTY). Mad Max is awesome, I agree.
- gundmc 6y agoDisagree on the Arkham games. Arkham Asylum and Arkham City were fantastic games with or without the Batman theme. The free-flowing combat in Arkham Asylum inspired countless other games including Shadow of Mordor. I hate this as a potential acquisition because I hate the trend towards more platform exclusives and this is definitely a move towards XBox/XCloud exclusivity.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- munchbunny 6y agoMicrosoft has been pretty clear on their direction of unified Xbox/PC gaming, so in general I haven't been remotely as concerned about the exclusivity problem. It would obviously be nice if it could also show up on PlayStation and Switch, but I'm personally happy that Xbox games that would previously have been console exclusives have been releasing as Xbox/PC games.
- WorldMaker 6y agoMicrosoft hasn't entirely been as clear about it, but there is a sense that Microsoft sees Xbox as a services platform/cloud provider for all consoles more than a single console today (and Microsoft themselves are emphasizing that with Series X it is definitely not a single console anymore and more of a console family). xCloud is likely to support every device that will have them. The current focus is on Android, but Microsoft has been working hard to convince Apple to let them have a first class XCloud experience on iOS, and there's rumors that Microsoft is trying to sweeten the pot with strong macOS support by xCloud. A bunch of Microsoft's Xbox "Exclusives" have quietly made their way to Switch over the last few years, complete with Xbox Account signin, and lots of rumors have been that Microsoft wants to heavily push Xbox as a cross-platform multiplayer stack on Switch, to point where the craziest rumors have been that Microsoft was even trying to sweet talk Nintendo themselves in letting them take over the gaming account system on Switch and leave Nintendo to core competencies. (With the recent Nintendo Account hijacking issues, that may even be a wise plan. Nintendo seem like they'd rather not be stewards of a complicated account system if they could get away with it.) In fears over Google's Stadia and nVidia's Cloud Gaming, Sony and Microsoft even announced a shared xCloud infrastructure plan, with xCloud going to take over some of PS Now's backend. That opens the possibility, as wild as it sounds, at this point that we might see more "Xbox Exclusive" games on PlayStation at least via xCloud on PS, given that announcement. (And Microsoft does have non-"Xbox Exclusive" games on PlayStation today, though that mostly just means Minecraft right now.) Again, almost all of that is scuttlebutt, rumors and rumors upon rumors, so it is definitely not "clear" what if anything Microsoft is thinking here, but "Xbox Exclusive" seems a lot more "flexible" than any of the other console platforms, because Microsoft's idea of a platform has shifted a lot with Azure.
- Avicebron 6y agoAny remember Mixer?
- DevKoala 6y agoSeriously... As a fan of Halo, I want them to support the Xbox forever, but as an investor, I wish they'd stop.
- partiallypro 6y agoWhy? Xbox is profitable. It wasn't 3 years ago, but it is now. Xbox Live is important to Microsoft's cloud vision.
- DevKoala 6y agoThat division’s revenue is declining YoY, and they are about to incur research costs for the new hardware, and perhaps subsidies. It just seems hard to believe for me that the opportunity cost is there, at least with their approach.
- richliss 6y agoI'm amazed they don't use the development costs to make a desktop Surface like the Mac Mini out of the Xbox Series X internals - may as well order more chips and spread the cost.
- WorldMaker 6y agoXbox Devices is supposed to roll up to Panos Panay now too, so anything is possible. It would not be a surprise if continued future alignment between Xbox and Surface is already in the plans.
- boardwaalk 6y agoI don't trust Microsoft much at all, privacy-wise, Windows-wise or otherwise not-being-evil-wise, but in my view, Warner Bros Interactive is the combination of the bad elements of the film industry with the depressing mediocrity of a second tier game developer/publisher. But they bought and hollowed out the maker of the favorite online game of my childhood, turning it into a mobile game developer, renegged on releasing the server so the community could keep it going, and refused negotiations to sell the IP, which is pretty worthless AFAICT. So I may be biased. If this goes through, I need to figure out who to talk to to see if we can recover it from whatever basement it's bit rotting in.
- WorldMaker 6y agoIt wouldn't be the first time Microsoft was involved with Asheron's Call, they originally published it after all. Microsoft has a bad/unlucky track record with MMO development/sales, but one of the better with handling the consequences. Turbine was allowed to move on, to keep their IP, to continue to be Turbine, when they exited their Microsoft partnership. The MMO Allegiance was open sourced by Microsoft and given to its community. I can't tell you that Microsoft would 100% do the right thing if they bought WB Games Boston and managed to get the Asheron's Call license with it (and that's a weird if, because who knows what WB's deal with Standing Stone was; WB might not even remember the way some of their licenses get lost), but I can tell you there's a lot more hope than AT&T (WB) continuing to sit on it (if they are the ones sitting on it).
- boardwaalk 6y agoOne can only hope Microsoft would do a good thing. The saddest thing would be if it was all just lost. I hadn't heard of Allegiance; that's interesting. [Aside: I do wonder where all the relevant artifacts would be kept. Do they have a vault with floor to ceiling shelving with all sorts of old stuff? Or is it all in the "cloud"?]
- WorldMaker 6y agoIf it is kept somewhere, it is likely still tape backups, which might indeed just be in a nice library room collecting dust on shelves. Though these days it might be "cloud" tape backups. (Most of the cloud providers offer "cold storage" that is slow and expensive to retrieve when you need it back, as that cold storage is just as likely to be tape backups and it takes time to retrieve a tape from a shelf, unspool that tape, and read from it.)
- nimbius 6y agoFirst they paid an overwhelming fortune with minecraft after the userbase had surely peaked, now warner after the DC universe and superhero genres in general have become overheated to the point of consumer exhaustion. Perhaps someone smarter than me can elaborate, but why is microsoft buying up IP thats arguably crested by around four years?
- partiallypro 6y agoMicrosoft more than made their money back on Minecraft
- altano 6y agoThe user base of Minecraft has skyrocketed to 126M monthly active players (https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2020/05/18/minecraft-connecting-more-players-than-ever-before/ https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2020/05/18/minecraft-connecting-...) so no, absolutely not.
- magicnubs 6y ago200 million copies of Minecraft sold to date, with 126 million active players each month? That seems almost impossible. It seems like that would mean that even most of the people who bought the game years ago are still playing every month.
- Mtinie 6y agoOne explanation: Nostalgic value in 5+ years.
- patagurbon 6y agoMinecraft was an absolute steal, theyve almost certainly made back their money. The rest of your statement is pretty agreeable, but MC is booming and will continue to be a fixture of gaming for at least 5+ more years imo. Despite all the clones theres still no successor on the horizon.
- mraza007 6y agolooks like Microsoft will be developing hitman game if this deal clears
- qppo 6y agoMaybe they can resurrect Midway from whatever circle of hell it is where you have to skin decades-old games with the latest branded content from your Hollywood/demon overlords
- WorldMaker 6y agoMy impression is that is what NetherRealm already is (and why their name is an allusion to the hell described in their own games).
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]