7 ms·

I know a lot of people here are anti-big tech and I am too, to a certain extent, but I want to play devil's advocate here and provide my case for the deal: Act

I know a lot of people here are anti-big tech and I am too, to a certain extent, but I want to play devil's advocate here and provide my case for the deal: Activision-Blizzard was in total corporate chaos before the deal was announced, the CEO (Bobby Kotick) was accused of permitting workplace sexual harassment and employees at the company were on the verge of mutiny. They were also seen as a stagnant publisher that only cared about its billion dollar franchises (Call of Duty and Candy Crush) while letting its other IPs like StarCraft and World of Warcraft rot and turning the beloved Diablo into a cash-grab pay-to-win mobile game. The Microsoft acquisition would have likely breathed some new life into the company and allowed corporate to clean up shop. This will probably lead to Activision-Blizzard continuing on its previous, doomed trajectory that it was on back in 2021.

newsclues 4y ago
Microsoft needs to clean up Activision-Blizzard, I totally agree. Two big bag companies, but surprising Microsoft is the better one.
edgyquant 4y ago
Right, the merge would have been good for activision and microsoft, but bad for the consumer.
capableweb 4y ago
If you wanna play devil's advocate, at least try to answer the concerns voiced by the watchdog. The concern is not who can develop the existing IPs the best or if Activision/Blizzard will continue to exist. The concern is that Microsoft already has a strong position, and consolidating it further will make it even harder than it is for new entrants to have any chance. > “Microsoft already enjoys a powerful position and head start over other competitors in cloud gaming and this deal would strengthen that advantage giving it the ability to undermine new and innovative competitors,” Martin Coleman, chair of the independent panel of experts conducting this investigation, said. If you're still up for playing devil's advocate, come up with an argument against that this acquisition wouldn't consolidate anything in Microsoft's favor, and as a result lead to fewer consumer choices.
- segasaturn 4y ago
  Microsoft is pretty consistently in last place in console market share and the Xbox brand is dwarfed by Sony and Tencent (China). Microsoft's strong current position in Cloud Gaming isn't because XCloud is devouring all the competition, its because the competition barely exists in the first place. Google and Amazon left their cloud gaming products to rot and GeForce now is very janky (but still quite popular from what I've heard!). Google and Amazon's mismanagement of their products doesn't automatically make XCloud into an aggressive anti-competitive monopoly, especially when you consider the fact that Microsoft inked a 10-year deal with Nintendo's cloud gaming provider to provide Call of Duty to the platform last month.
  - xzel 4y ago
    As someone who was using GeForce during the pandemic it is a great service but janky is an understatement. There are a huge number of common "edge" cases I've run into: getting long passwords into games, passing mac keyboard commands to essentially windows buttons, etc. Still, it is AMAZING being able to play any game anywhere. But I'm not sure if the market for these products were/are big enough for so many players so pretty much everyone has dropped out.
  - capableweb 4y ago
    You can read the summary yourself if you want, but it's 400+ pages, so might take a while. It's here: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/644939aa529eda000c3b0525/Microsoft_Activision_Final_Report_.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/644939aa529ed... Key takeaways: > In relation to console gaming services, we found that Xbox (Microsoft) and PlayStation (Sony) compete closely with each other, and that Activision’s Call of Duty (CoD) is important to the competitive offering of each. The evidence suggests, however, that Microsoft would not find it financially beneficial to make CoD exclusive to Xbox after the Merger. We also found that making CoD available on Xbox on better terms than on PlayStation would not materially harm PlayStation’s ability to compete. On this basis, we found that the Merger would not substantially reduce competition in console gaming services in the UK. > In relation to cloud gaming services, we found that Microsoft already has a strong position. It owns a popular gaming platform (Xbox and a large portfolio of games), the leading PC operating system (Windows), and a global cloud computing infrastructure (Azure and Xbox Cloud Gaming), giving it important advantages in running a cloud gaming service. With an estimated 60-70% market share in global cloud gaming services, it is already much stronger than its rivals. > We found that the Merger would make Microsoft even stronger and substantially reduce competition in this market. According to the people who done this research (CMA), they seem to say MS already have a 60-70% marketshare, and making that higher via a acquisition, will make it harder for others to enter the market. CMA of course cannot make competition to step up, but they can try to stop incumbents from becoming monopolies, which is what's happening here.
maxsilver 4y ago
I agree with most of this, but this isn't an argument for Activision-Blizzard merging with Microsoft, this is an argument that Activision-Blizzard shareholders need to throw out Bobby Kotick and his folks, and replace them with competent leadership (or really, anyone with a pulse who won't union-bust and won't sexually harass people, would be more qualified at this point). It's ridiculous that a company with this many talented people, and this much treasured IP, is languishing in this state and tied up with such easy-to-avoid internal-only mistakes. > The Microsoft acquisition would have likely breathed some new life into the company and allowed corporate to clean up shop Maybe. But it seems more likely that Microsoft would have cleaned up leadership a tiny bit and then left Activision-Blizzard to slowly quietly rot away, in much the same way that Microsoft has treated Halo.
- fireflash38 4y ago
  Agreed. But tossing leadership & getting new supposedly 'better' leadership is high risk, whereas an acquisition is low-risk and more reliable at getting short term gains. There's a substantial portion of the tech startup sphere whose entire goals are: get big enough to get acquired and get a big bag from the sale. It kind of runs counter to current sentiment around here.
- nashashmi 4y ago
  > It's ridiculous that a company with this many talented people, and this much treasured IP, is languishing in this state and tied up with such easy-to-avoid internal-only mistakes. It's why they are languishing. It's the "resource curse". On the contrary, It's one of the reasons why Microsoft is a killer machine. They are disciplined and focused. That kind of discipline stifles away creativity (like Skype and yammer).
- Salgat 4y ago
  One is a solution that fixes the issue now, the other is us hoping for shareholders to eventually do the morally right thing (which is a silly thing to expect).
- ddtaylor 4y ago
  Shareholders can get rid of Bobby Kotick and do all kinds of other leadership changes and it's not going to fix some of the problems that some of us were hopeful for. Microsoft has shown some resolve when it comes to supporting games in spaces that aren't absolute gold mines, specifically in the Real Time Strategy (RTS) genre. They are publishers of Age of Empires, which all things considered is a drop in the bucket when revenue wise, yet it still is allowed to exist. Blizzard (via Activision) mostly exploits or kills all of it's "less-than" products, which increasingly is almost everything when compared to the behemoths like Call of Duty and Candy Crush. It was probably a bit of wishful thinking, but some of us were actually excited that Microsoft would get access to some of the games that don't get supported very well while the customer base is literally holding their wallets out asking to pay to support the game. For example, Heroes of the Storm does have a dedicated following and we're ready to pay $10/mo or something similar to help support the game, but it's literally spent the last three years patching after every time it runs because it's broken. It still plays fine, but it eats gigabytes per month of bandwidth all because nobody cares enough to modify an XML file or something. The same is true of Diablo II: Resurrected. It's a great game, but we can't pay for extra stash tabs which in the ARPG genre is kind of the go-to monetization strategy these days. Everyone would be fine paying $5 for a few stash tabs and it would be a good way to support ongoing development and maybe pave the way to getting the long awaited "Act 6" content everyone would love or even just allow the team to spend a bit more time adding more end-game meta content.
spprashant 4y ago
As far as devil's advocate argument goes I suppose its valid. But I wouldn't think this changes the opinion on any antitrust violation concerns. If a company has problems, especially cultural issues, it should fix them or die.
madeofpalk 4y ago
If the company is bad, then the company should fail.
Art9681 4y ago
The trending story on the Microsoft gaming division side is how badly Xbox is doing. I don't think Microsoft is doing anyone a favor by acquiring gaming companies at this point. It's evident that Microsoft is where game development studios go to die. Bethesda's acquisition is extremely demoralizing due to this. I hope Starfield succeeds as it's my most anticipated game of all time.
rvz 4y ago
Or maybe we should not be supporting horizontal integration of already large companies in the same industry acquiring other large companies. The acquisition of Bethesda doesn't help Microsoft's case of horizontal integration or even their future intentions with cloud gaming with the potential integration of their existing Xbox game pass service even if they acquired Activision-Blizzard. Seems like the UK regulators decision in that regard was the wise decision and it was the right one.
misssocrates 4y ago
Was that proven? And how close did employees get to taking over the company?
- segasaturn 4y ago
  Employees weren't staging a literal mutiny, I was using the term creatively. Here are some links about the worker unrest at ABK prior to acquisition announcement: Activision Blizzard worker organization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activision_Blizzard_worker_organization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activision_Blizzard_worker_org... Activision Blizzard employees stage open-ended strike and union drive: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/12/activision-blizzard-workers-announce-open-ended-strike-and-union-drive/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/12/activision-blizzard-w... Its noteworthy that the employee strikes mostly stopped after the acquisition was announced - seems they believed like I do that Microsoft would have cleaned things up.
samstave 4y ago
The price of ~~content~~ games is too damn high! - Basically this, the cost for a AAA game at ~$69.99 is just fucking ridiculous.
- nluken 4y ago
  AAA games take thousands of hours of labor from huge teams to create. When you consider how much work goes into it, $70 seems like a bargain. Also, if you account for inflation these kinds of games are cheaper now than they've been for most of gaming's history. In practice, however, many games fail to break out of super basic gameplay loops. I usually prefer cheaper indie games where I have more fun.
- ErneX 4y ago
  There were 70 USD games in the 90s. Yeah those were cartridge games but still, it’s probably the sector were inflation has been felt the least.
  - samstave 4y ago
    And my salary was $6.72 cents./hr at 16 years old. *1993* Compare that to today.
  - mrguyorama 4y ago
    In the 90s I didn't have to give Rare $5 to play as oddjob, and another $5 to make heads big, and another $5 to fight slaps only, and another $5 to..... That's the difference. Those games were $70 because the ROM chips nintendo forced you to use were basically unavailable at sufficient quantities. Playstation games were cheaper despite being able to use literally 10x the amount of assets. The only people forcing AAA studios to add a billion polygons to every stick are themselves. They haven't tried anything different, so of course they think it's the only option. Meanwhile billions of dollars a year go to people who spent $10 on an asset in the unity store to back up a game that actually is interesting. Actually, even worse, they often AREN'T wasting millions on assets. Grand Turismo 7 has plenty of cars that are just copy/pasted from the previous release.
kernal 4y ago
>the CEO (Bobby Kotick) was accused of permitting workplace sexual harassment and employees at the company were on the verge of mutiny. >Microsoft received 721 employee complaints of discrimination and harassment in the U.S. between 2019 and 2021, and Microsoft investigators found most allegations to be "unsubstantiated". Excluding the 2022-23 complaints, I'm just wondering which company do you think is under more "chaos" and on the verge of "mutiny" right now?
lofaszvanitt 4y ago
:DDDDDD The gaming landscape already looks like a barren desert. More consolidation will lead to more desert like features.
ericmcer 4y ago
It is crazy how Blizzard was a few hundred employees when they released Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo over a couple years. Now with 50X as many employees and 23 years of effort they have done nothing but coast off their original hits. I don't know why this happens but it seems to occur again and again in gaming with indie studios that get acquired.
- rightbyte 4y ago
  I got a feeling developers nowadays are so much less efficient than 10-20 years ago. The tools are so bloated and arcane compared to the can-do approach. Also agile messes up productivity alot due to its inflexible and process heavy nature.
  - ErneX 4y ago
    Producing game assets of the quality expected nowadays takes a lot of time.
    - danbolt 4y ago
      I think that's a big element of this. The sort of quality bar we see in StarCraft or WarCraft III would come across as kit-bashing or stylized low-budget indie today. Shipping a AAA-style game in a timely fashion needs a larger production process than earlier works. The sort of issues around engineering and linked-lists[1] in the original StarCraft wouldn't really be an issue today. Teams are operating in a very different way. [1] https://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/tough-times-on-the-road-to-starcraft https://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/tough-times-on-the-road-to-...
    - rightbyte 4y ago
      Ye that's true.
- mritchie712 4y ago
  * Success often brings bureaucracy to protect against losing what you've got going for you * The bureaucracy drives away the types of misfit maniacs that build incredible and unique products. * You're left with people more worried about fucking up then they are about building something awesome.
mehlmao 4y ago
Microsoft acquiring Bethesda fixed none of their management issues; why would this be any different? Further, Microsoft lied to EU regulators about what they'd do with the Zenimax / Bethesda acquisition.
AlexandrB 4y ago
> and turning the beloved Diablo into a cash-grab pay-to-win mobile game. A decision which has made them a metric shit-ton of money. Why would they stop when they've found a winning formula? And why would Microsoft decide to stop such an easy revenue stream? Sure the Diablo name is being dragged through the mud (among a particular demographic, at least) but the consequences for that are years or even decades away. If anything, "cleaning up shop" might mean shutting down the less profitable divisions - something Blizzard has been actively doing anyway. > This will probably lead to Activision-Blizzard continuing on its previous, doomed trajectory that it was on back in 2021. Maybe their trajectory is doomed when measured in decades. Right now they're printing cash. I think they're happy to abandon their legacy "core" audience in exchange for the gacha whales that will pay them multiples more for a cheaper-to-make experience. I realize that a lot of us grew up with Blizzard games, I myself have all the CE boxes they shipped since Warcraft III. But the people who made those experiences are generally long gone. A change of ownership is unlikely to radically change priorities or bring back the magic.
- aranelsurion 4y ago
  To be fair, looking at how both Diablo 4 (PC/Consoles) and Diablo Immortal (Mobile) are doing today, they seem to be on the way to capture both audiences with solid products in either side. Mobile gaming industry sucks so much, D:I is actually a good product there. It offers so much more than your regular ad-infested crap with "recharge energy" mechanics at the very least. It might be the worst compared to what is available on PC/consoles, but those are different audiences. For the more informed consumers Blizzard has Diablo 4, where they seem to restrain greed to somewhat acceptable levels. Yes they've fumbled with their PR back then, might've made one of the worst presentations in industry history (look at Bethesda & Fallout Shelter and see it being masterfully done) and generally been incompetent in a few of their recent titles (W3: Reforged and OW2 comes first into mind), still, looking at it today, Diablo as a franchise looks like a right step than otherwise.
nonethewiser 4y ago
> The Microsoft acquisition would have likely breathed some new life into the company and allowed corporate to clean up shop. This is irrelevant to the committee’s decision. The question is if the merger is too anti competitive.

newsclues 4y ago

Microsoft needs to clean up Activision-Blizzard, I totally agree. Two big bag companies, but surprising Microsoft is the better one.

edgyquant 4y ago

Right, the merge would have been good for activision and microsoft, but bad for the consumer.

capableweb 4y ago

If you wanna play devil's advocate, at least try to answer the concerns voiced by the watchdog. The concern is not who can develop the existing IPs the best or if Activision/Blizzard will continue to exist. The concern is that Microsoft already has a strong position, and consolidating it further will make it even harder than it is for new entrants to have any chance. > “Microsoft already enjoys a powerful position and head start over other competitors in cloud gaming and this deal would strengthen that advantage giving it the ability to undermine new and innovative competitors,” Martin Coleman, chair of the independent panel of experts conducting this investigation, said. If you're still up for playing devil's advocate, come up with an argument against that this acquisition wouldn't consolidate anything in Microsoft's favor, and as a result lead to fewer consumer choices.

segasaturn 4y ago
Microsoft is pretty consistently in last place in console market share and the Xbox brand is dwarfed by Sony and Tencent (China). Microsoft's strong current position in Cloud Gaming isn't because XCloud is devouring all the competition, its because the competition barely exists in the first place. Google and Amazon left their cloud gaming products to rot and GeForce now is very janky (but still quite popular from what I've heard!). Google and Amazon's mismanagement of their products doesn't automatically make XCloud into an aggressive anti-competitive monopoly, especially when you consider the fact that Microsoft inked a 10-year deal with Nintendo's cloud gaming provider to provide Call of Duty to the platform last month.
- xzel 4y ago
  As someone who was using GeForce during the pandemic it is a great service but janky is an understatement. There are a huge number of common "edge" cases I've run into: getting long passwords into games, passing mac keyboard commands to essentially windows buttons, etc. Still, it is AMAZING being able to play any game anywhere. But I'm not sure if the market for these products were/are big enough for so many players so pretty much everyone has dropped out.
- capableweb 4y ago
  You can read the summary yourself if you want, but it's 400+ pages, so might take a while. It's here: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/644939aa529eda000c3b0525/Microsoft_Activision_Final_Report_.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/644939aa529ed... Key takeaways: > In relation to console gaming services, we found that Xbox (Microsoft) and PlayStation (Sony) compete closely with each other, and that Activision’s Call of Duty (CoD) is important to the competitive offering of each. The evidence suggests, however, that Microsoft would not find it financially beneficial to make CoD exclusive to Xbox after the Merger. We also found that making CoD available on Xbox on better terms than on PlayStation would not materially harm PlayStation’s ability to compete. On this basis, we found that the Merger would not substantially reduce competition in console gaming services in the UK. > In relation to cloud gaming services, we found that Microsoft already has a strong position. It owns a popular gaming platform (Xbox and a large portfolio of games), the leading PC operating system (Windows), and a global cloud computing infrastructure (Azure and Xbox Cloud Gaming), giving it important advantages in running a cloud gaming service. With an estimated 60-70% market share in global cloud gaming services, it is already much stronger than its rivals. > We found that the Merger would make Microsoft even stronger and substantially reduce competition in this market. According to the people who done this research (CMA), they seem to say MS already have a 60-70% marketshare, and making that higher via a acquisition, will make it harder for others to enter the market. CMA of course cannot make competition to step up, but they can try to stop incumbents from becoming monopolies, which is what's happening here.

maxsilver 4y ago

I agree with most of this, but this isn't an argument for Activision-Blizzard merging with Microsoft, this is an argument that Activision-Blizzard shareholders need to throw out Bobby Kotick and his folks, and replace them with competent leadership (or really, anyone with a pulse who won't union-bust and won't sexually harass people, would be more qualified at this point). It's ridiculous that a company with this many talented people, and this much treasured IP, is languishing in this state and tied up with such easy-to-avoid internal-only mistakes. > The Microsoft acquisition would have likely breathed some new life into the company and allowed corporate to clean up shop Maybe. But it seems more likely that Microsoft would have cleaned up leadership a tiny bit and then left Activision-Blizzard to slowly quietly rot away, in much the same way that Microsoft has treated Halo.

fireflash38 4y ago
Agreed. But tossing leadership & getting new supposedly 'better' leadership is high risk, whereas an acquisition is low-risk and more reliable at getting short term gains. There's a substantial portion of the tech startup sphere whose entire goals are: get big enough to get acquired and get a big bag from the sale. It kind of runs counter to current sentiment around here.
nashashmi 4y ago
> It's ridiculous that a company with this many talented people, and this much treasured IP, is languishing in this state and tied up with such easy-to-avoid internal-only mistakes. It's why they are languishing. It's the "resource curse". On the contrary, It's one of the reasons why Microsoft is a killer machine. They are disciplined and focused. That kind of discipline stifles away creativity (like Skype and yammer).
Salgat 4y ago
One is a solution that fixes the issue now, the other is us hoping for shareholders to eventually do the morally right thing (which is a silly thing to expect).
ddtaylor 4y ago
Shareholders can get rid of Bobby Kotick and do all kinds of other leadership changes and it's not going to fix some of the problems that some of us were hopeful for. Microsoft has shown some resolve when it comes to supporting games in spaces that aren't absolute gold mines, specifically in the Real Time Strategy (RTS) genre. They are publishers of Age of Empires, which all things considered is a drop in the bucket when revenue wise, yet it still is allowed to exist. Blizzard (via Activision) mostly exploits or kills all of it's "less-than" products, which increasingly is almost everything when compared to the behemoths like Call of Duty and Candy Crush. It was probably a bit of wishful thinking, but some of us were actually excited that Microsoft would get access to some of the games that don't get supported very well while the customer base is literally holding their wallets out asking to pay to support the game. For example, Heroes of the Storm does have a dedicated following and we're ready to pay $10/mo or something similar to help support the game, but it's literally spent the last three years patching after every time it runs because it's broken. It still plays fine, but it eats gigabytes per month of bandwidth all because nobody cares enough to modify an XML file or something. The same is true of Diablo II: Resurrected. It's a great game, but we can't pay for extra stash tabs which in the ARPG genre is kind of the go-to monetization strategy these days. Everyone would be fine paying $5 for a few stash tabs and it would be a good way to support ongoing development and maybe pave the way to getting the long awaited "Act 6" content everyone would love or even just allow the team to spend a bit more time adding more end-game meta content.

spprashant 4y ago

As far as devil's advocate argument goes I suppose its valid. But I wouldn't think this changes the opinion on any antitrust violation concerns. If a company has problems, especially cultural issues, it should fix them or die.

madeofpalk 4y ago

If the company is bad, then the company should fail.

Art9681 4y ago

The trending story on the Microsoft gaming division side is how badly Xbox is doing. I don't think Microsoft is doing anyone a favor by acquiring gaming companies at this point. It's evident that Microsoft is where game development studios go to die. Bethesda's acquisition is extremely demoralizing due to this. I hope Starfield succeeds as it's my most anticipated game of all time.

rvz 4y ago

Or maybe we should not be supporting horizontal integration of already large companies in the same industry acquiring other large companies. The acquisition of Bethesda doesn't help Microsoft's case of horizontal integration or even their future intentions with cloud gaming with the potential integration of their existing Xbox game pass service even if they acquired Activision-Blizzard. Seems like the UK regulators decision in that regard was the wise decision and it was the right one.

misssocrates 4y ago

Was that proven? And how close did employees get to taking over the company?

segasaturn 4y ago
Employees weren't staging a literal mutiny, I was using the term creatively. Here are some links about the worker unrest at ABK prior to acquisition announcement: Activision Blizzard worker organization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activision_Blizzard_worker_organization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activision_Blizzard_worker_org... Activision Blizzard employees stage open-ended strike and union drive: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/12/activision-blizzard-workers-announce-open-ended-strike-and-union-drive/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/12/activision-blizzard-w... Its noteworthy that the employee strikes mostly stopped after the acquisition was announced - seems they believed like I do that Microsoft would have cleaned things up.

samstave 4y ago

The price of ~~content~~ games is too damn high! - Basically this, the cost for a AAA game at ~$69.99 is just fucking ridiculous.

nluken 4y ago
AAA games take thousands of hours of labor from huge teams to create. When you consider how much work goes into it, $70 seems like a bargain. Also, if you account for inflation these kinds of games are cheaper now than they've been for most of gaming's history. In practice, however, many games fail to break out of super basic gameplay loops. I usually prefer cheaper indie games where I have more fun.
ErneX 4y ago
There were 70 USD games in the 90s. Yeah those were cartridge games but still, it’s probably the sector were inflation has been felt the least.
- samstave 4y ago
  And my salary was $6.72 cents./hr at 16 years old. *1993* Compare that to today.
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  In the 90s I didn't have to give Rare $5 to play as oddjob, and another $5 to make heads big, and another $5 to fight slaps only, and another $5 to..... That's the difference. Those games were $70 because the ROM chips nintendo forced you to use were basically unavailable at sufficient quantities. Playstation games were cheaper despite being able to use literally 10x the amount of assets. The only people forcing AAA studios to add a billion polygons to every stick are themselves. They haven't tried anything different, so of course they think it's the only option. Meanwhile billions of dollars a year go to people who spent $10 on an asset in the unity store to back up a game that actually is interesting. Actually, even worse, they often AREN'T wasting millions on assets. Grand Turismo 7 has plenty of cars that are just copy/pasted from the previous release.

kernal 4y ago

>the CEO (Bobby Kotick) was accused of permitting workplace sexual harassment and employees at the company were on the verge of mutiny. >Microsoft received 721 employee complaints of discrimination and harassment in the U.S. between 2019 and 2021, and Microsoft investigators found most allegations to be "unsubstantiated". Excluding the 2022-23 complaints, I'm just wondering which company do you think is under more "chaos" and on the verge of "mutiny" right now?

lofaszvanitt 4y ago

:DDDDDD The gaming landscape already looks like a barren desert. More consolidation will lead to more desert like features.

ericmcer 4y ago

It is crazy how Blizzard was a few hundred employees when they released Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo over a couple years. Now with 50X as many employees and 23 years of effort they have done nothing but coast off their original hits. I don't know why this happens but it seems to occur again and again in gaming with indie studios that get acquired.

rightbyte 4y ago
I got a feeling developers nowadays are so much less efficient than 10-20 years ago. The tools are so bloated and arcane compared to the can-do approach. Also agile messes up productivity alot due to its inflexible and process heavy nature.
- ErneX 4y ago
  Producing game assets of the quality expected nowadays takes a lot of time.
  - danbolt 4y ago
    I think that's a big element of this. The sort of quality bar we see in StarCraft or WarCraft III would come across as kit-bashing or stylized low-budget indie today. Shipping a AAA-style game in a timely fashion needs a larger production process than earlier works. The sort of issues around engineering and linked-lists[1] in the original StarCraft wouldn't really be an issue today. Teams are operating in a very different way. [1] https://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/tough-times-on-the-road-to-starcraft https://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/tough-times-on-the-road-to-...
  - rightbyte 4y ago
    Ye that's true.
mritchie712 4y ago
* Success often brings bureaucracy to protect against losing what you've got going for you * The bureaucracy drives away the types of misfit maniacs that build incredible and unique products. * You're left with people more worried about fucking up then they are about building something awesome.

mehlmao 4y ago

Microsoft acquiring Bethesda fixed none of their management issues; why would this be any different? Further, Microsoft lied to EU regulators about what they'd do with the Zenimax / Bethesda acquisition.

AlexandrB 4y ago

> and turning the beloved Diablo into a cash-grab pay-to-win mobile game. A decision which has made them a metric shit-ton of money. Why would they stop when they've found a winning formula? And why would Microsoft decide to stop such an easy revenue stream? Sure the Diablo name is being dragged through the mud (among a particular demographic, at least) but the consequences for that are years or even decades away. If anything, "cleaning up shop" might mean shutting down the less profitable divisions - something Blizzard has been actively doing anyway. > This will probably lead to Activision-Blizzard continuing on its previous, doomed trajectory that it was on back in 2021. Maybe their trajectory is doomed when measured in decades. Right now they're printing cash. I think they're happy to abandon their legacy "core" audience in exchange for the gacha whales that will pay them multiples more for a cheaper-to-make experience. I realize that a lot of us grew up with Blizzard games, I myself have all the CE boxes they shipped since Warcraft III. But the people who made those experiences are generally long gone. A change of ownership is unlikely to radically change priorities or bring back the magic.

aranelsurion 4y ago
To be fair, looking at how both Diablo 4 (PC/Consoles) and Diablo Immortal (Mobile) are doing today, they seem to be on the way to capture both audiences with solid products in either side. Mobile gaming industry sucks so much, D:I is actually a good product there. It offers so much more than your regular ad-infested crap with "recharge energy" mechanics at the very least. It might be the worst compared to what is available on PC/consoles, but those are different audiences. For the more informed consumers Blizzard has Diablo 4, where they seem to restrain greed to somewhat acceptable levels. Yes they've fumbled with their PR back then, might've made one of the worst presentations in industry history (look at Bethesda & Fallout Shelter and see it being masterfully done) and generally been incompetent in a few of their recent titles (W3: Reforged and OW2 comes first into mind), still, looking at it today, Diablo as a franchise looks like a right step than otherwise.

nonethewiser 4y ago

> The Microsoft acquisition would have likely breathed some new life into the company and allowed corporate to clean up shop. This is irrelevant to the committee’s decision. The question is if the merger is too anti competitive.