8 ms·

Its extremely frustrating how we let the tech companies get to be this large, such that now we really have to consider blocking every acquisition, even though t

by 015a 3y ago

Its extremely frustrating how we let the tech companies get to be this large, such that now we really have to consider blocking every acquisition, even though this one in particular I think wouldn't be all that bad and may actually be a positive for consumers. Activision is an unusually cruel and extremely horrible company, whereas the Xbox Division of Microsoft has been one of maybe only a couple "great" stewards of the gaming industry for consumers (Epic is also a great company, but beyond those two when it comes to major developers/publishers there's far more bad than good). I'm genuinely of the opinion that all of Xbox, Activision, and their customers will be worse-off without this deal. This is a HackerNews Arm Chair Quarterbacking Stretch, but I think a really positive move for Microsoft would be to spin-off Xbox into a separate company. I can't imagine the division is all that profitable; its grown to confer practically zero positive network effects for Microsoft's other businesses. Culturally its got to be the weirdest thing Microsoft does nowadays. This AB deal likely single-handedly increases the valuation of the division by, jeeze, 50%? Maybe more.

mikepurvis 3y ago
I feel like with Gamepass and all their exclusives being day 1 on Windows as well, there's probably more crossover nowadays than there has been in years, but overall you're right that spinning out Xbox entirely would make a lot of sense.
- newswasboring 3y ago
  Is the xbox division the main gaming division of MS?
- mehlmao 3y ago
  They can't spin out Gamepass because it is a money pit. There aren't enough subscribers to fund large budget game development. At the same time, Gamepass trains subscribers to not purchase new games, because they'll be on Gamepass eventually.
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    I hate the idea of Gamepass because I saw it happen to cable television. In the 1980s, for instance, MTV really showed music videos. It got bought by old fogey Sumner Redstone who decided unilaterally that we couldn't see music videos anymore -- funny now that we have YouTube it's been discovered that people want to watch music videos when they can. (A bit of destruction like Musk buying Twitter?) If you buy a game you are voting with your dollar, if you subscribe they're going to make an Assassin's Creed game this year, and next year, and the year after that, and the year after that. The game industry is going to make whatever games it wants to make, and Microsoft will pay them, and I guess people will play them because they don't have a choice. We saw that with cable, since they get paid whether or not you watch, they can skimp on quality and collect increasing payments year after year. The movie and TV industry has been driven mad by streaming because suddenly performance matters... Disney is completely capable of producing a product that upholds it's brand but why do it when you can get $7 a month from every cable subscriber for ESPN whether or not they watch sports?
    - kbenson 3y ago
      I'm confused why you think they aren't tracking what games are played for how long, and won't optimize based on that. I would assume there's some royalty type situation with gamepass where the games that get played more get some percentage of a pool. You can rail about cable all you want, but some of the best shows of the last few decades were on cable. Breaking bad, mad men, the shield. Greatly expanding the choices allowed for networks to take risks in attempts to gain a small but I yerested audience, rather than having to appeal to the entire general public, and what we got was amazing.
      - smolder 3y ago
        More time spent does not equal enjoyment. Some games treat their players like employees and make them work pretty hard for their imaginary prizes. I wouldn't want a games library optimized for maximum time expenditure.
        3y ago
zopppo 3y ago
> Its extremely frustrating how we let the tech companies get to be this large, such that now we really have to consider blocking every acquisition, even though this one in particular I think wouldn't be all that bad and may actually be a positive for consumers. As an avid world of warcraft player, the community as a whole has been hoping the merger goes through for exactly this reason. Activision has seemingly forced through a lot of bad changes over the years to try wring out as much money as they can.
- segasaturn 3y ago
  I'm a part of the StarCraft 2 community and we were similarly hopeful about this deal as StarCraft has been neglected by the company for years. The community was already in full doom mode over Korean tournament funding getting pulled, this is not going to improve the atmosphere.
- taeric 3y ago
  I'm curious on how a MS merger would be good? At the start, they would almost certainly try to merge user accounts into MSN accounts. Likely force a migration down the line, after merging doesn't work.
  - themitigating 3y ago
    If they merge user accounts but you can support for older products or other game changes it's possible people would be ok with that
    - taeric 3y ago
      Certainly many would be ok with it. The ones it will hurt will be the heavy users that have multiple accounts, is my guess. Also is annoying to families. Game accounts are just game accounts, even if that has grown. Giving the kids an MSN account did not sit well with me.
      - fbdab103 3y ago
dmonitor 3y ago
Xbox is loss leading hard for Microsoft right now. Profits are down, console sales are down, and things on the horizon are looking not too great. If Xbox spun off, they’d go out of business within the decade because there’s no reason to own one besides taking advantage of Microsoft’s net-negative gaming subscription.
- davemp 3y ago
  It seems like video game consoles aren't competing based on practicality (hardware) anymore and are mostly just rent seeking with ways to abuse the legal/IP system. There used to be a much bigger moat to assemble a platform that could play cutting edge games. Now PC game engines/graphics drivers are getting so good the console SDKs aren't such a big boon and the hardware is basically just CotS.
  - dmonitor 3y ago
    Yeah. Sony and Nintendo still try to shake things up with their bespoke controllers and hardware doohickeys, but Microsoft's approach is just to release plain old PCs that only run their code.
    - seventhtiger 3y ago
      Nintendo would be successful even without hardware. Their IPs have firmly planted themselves in global awareness to an unimaginable level. They'd give Disney a run for their money. Then on top of that they built an ecosystem of toys and software to monetize their adoring customers. Nintendo recognized the deadend of the hardware race in the early 2000s, and continued developing their "mascots" while Sony and MS abandoned theirs. I don't think Microsoft and Sony have the DNA to pull of something like this. They are still software and hardware companies respectively.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
mustacheemperor 3y ago
>has been one of maybe only a couple "great" stewards of the gaming industry for consumers I'm not sure I'd give them much credit on this, since MS/Xbox hasn't achieved much at all in the gaming industry over recent years. Maybe there's not much egregious evil there a-la Activision's leadership scandals, but the track record is not great. As a gaming industry consumer who's been playing Microsoft consoles and games my entire life, MS has recently: - Ruined the Halo franchise - Stymied the current console gen with the Series S' weak memory capabilities - Acquired multiple beloved studios and released little to nothing over 5+ years, with their highest profile release being Starfield, the game Bethesda was already developing when MS bought them and made it a platform exclusive - Edit: Forgot trying to turn the Xbox One into an always-online TV set-top box Spinning off Xbox might be a good idea, if it's MS' senior leadership that keeps hamstringing their success. Because if the Activision acquisition proceeded like their previous studio acquisitions, we would see one or two Activision games release in the next decade, along with maybe a mediocre COD TV show.
- waboremo 3y ago
  Xbox's role in the gaming industry has, funny enough, very little to do with Xbox itself. It's their competitive presence that has kept Playstation from stagnating and making terrible decisions. You can see this extremely clearly when the 360 was outselling the PS3 and Playstation/Sony made plenty of management changes to shift directions.
  - mustacheemperor 3y ago
    I can agree there - MS has an important competitive role in the marketplace and it's not like Sony has always been a great steward to the community by comparison. I have mixed feelings about exclusives in general, but Sony has certainly played that game more than MS. But the 360 was unveiled in 2005 and was replaced in the market a decade ago. My criticisms are really oriented to the last 5-10 years. On that note, I'm reminded of the Xbox One "your game console is for watching TV and will always be connected to the internet" release. And in that generation, it was the clamoring market and Sony's response (like the classic 'how to share secondhand games' video[0]) that pushed Microsoft to stop acting unreasonably. [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48nCBnc9VBs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48nCBnc9VBs
waboremo 3y ago
Xbox is Microsoft's only consumer division that has substantial revenue. Even consumer office brings in half of what Xbox does. Microsoft is making the right moves here slowly shifting away from hardware (no profit) into software in the gaming space, but it's going to take some more time to do so. Potentially it makes more sense to drop xcloud (huge black hole for the next ~10 years), to adhere to CMA's claims of them dominating the cloud gaming space, so they can continue with Game Pass (the part that actually matters for Xbox).
stonemetal12 3y ago
Games aren't bad for MS, It brings in more than 3 billion a quarter. How many times have you seen I do most of my stuff on Linux but I still boot in to windows for games. An independent xbox would be less likely to use Windows for their OS.
- InitialLastName 3y ago
  Given how badly the Xbox for Windows system functions (lots of games don't even support the Xbox Series S/X controller reliably until you set them up to use Steam as their launcher), it already seems like the Xbox organization doesn't think much about Windows.
pb7 3y ago
>Epic is also a great company No, it's not. It does the exact same shit that Activision does except it targets an even younger more vulnerable demographic. Did you forget about this? https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2022/12/245-million-ftc-settlement-alleges-fortnite-owner-epic-games-used-digital-dark-patterns-charge https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2022/12/245-milli...
- waboremo 3y ago
  I wonder when the FTC is going to crack down on mobile gaming for this reason. Google and Apple profit tremendously from various companies targeting vulnerable demographics in their games.
  - hnfong 3y ago
    Well, it's only a stupid authoritarian act when China does it...
- 015a 3y ago
  I don't agree with the FTC's conclusion on that case, and while it doesn't reflect positively on Epic, its not nearly as negative as the myriad of things other gaming companies do on the regular (lootboxes being a big one, which are still very common in Activision, EA, & Valve games, among others). Epic is one of the good ones; that doesn't mean they always do good things.
  - panopticon 3y ago
    > Epic is one of the good ones Maybe if your only comparison is Activision and EA. When you consider all the dark patterns Fortnite employs to encourage logging playtime and making purchases, they're only separated from those others by degrees. Stacked up against developers that largely avoid those patterns (FromSoft, Nintendo, CDPR, etc), Epic is most certainly closer to the "bad" side of the spectrum.
    - pb7 3y ago
giantg2 3y ago
"Its extremely frustrating how we let the tech companies get to be this large," With how quickly tech changes and the risks involved, companies have to find multiple revenue streams if they want to survive. Pretty much every startup dream is to one day become a huge company.
iepathos 3y ago
> spin-off Xbox into a separate company. I can't imagine the division is all that profitable only like $5 billion in annual revenue, doubt they'll want to let that go for no reason.
toyg 3y ago
> Activision is an unusually cruel and extremely horrible company, whereas the Xbox Division Even if this were true, there is no guarantee that the acquiring culture will actually be imposed on the acquired. In fact it's often the opposite, with the acquired "infecting" the parent company - particularly when the acquired comes with a large headcount.
7952 3y ago
I guess it could reduce the risk of another platform creating network effects.
munificent 3y ago
The solution to Activision being horrible shouldn't be to let it get eaten by a marginally less horrible even more giant company. It should be to break it into smaller pieces so that consumers have the flexibility to avoid the more toxic segments of the company and the market can decide whether their bad behavior matters or not.
- augment003 3y ago
  Why doesn’t the market just avoid the whole thing, which is toxic?
ldoughty 3y ago
Is part of what makes companies like this horrible the fact they WANT to get bought? The one company I have in depth knowledge of going through an acquisition tried to drive employees away where possible, and fire others, down to a skeleton crew of overworked disgruntled employees because it makes them look REALLY good in the short term for being acquired. If you couldn't count on acquisitions by larger companies being approved easily, the only other way to game companies can generate profit is by maintaining current games (at least to being playable, without terrible reviews from bugs), and /or develop new games...
- greedo 3y ago
  I was literally fired while recovering from cancer surgery because the company I worked for was selling itself to Wimba (who in turn was selling itself to Blackboard). My company wanted to reduce headcount to look better for Wimba. Screw those guys...

by 015a 3y ago

mikepurvis 3y ago

I feel like with Gamepass and all their exclusives being day 1 on Windows as well, there's probably more crossover nowadays than there has been in years, but overall you're right that spinning out Xbox entirely would make a lot of sense.

newswasboring 3y ago
Is the xbox division the main gaming division of MS?
mehlmao 3y ago
They can't spin out Gamepass because it is a money pit. There aren't enough subscribers to fund large budget game development. At the same time, Gamepass trains subscribers to not purchase new games, because they'll be on Gamepass eventually.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  I hate the idea of Gamepass because I saw it happen to cable television. In the 1980s, for instance, MTV really showed music videos. It got bought by old fogey Sumner Redstone who decided unilaterally that we couldn't see music videos anymore -- funny now that we have YouTube it's been discovered that people want to watch music videos when they can. (A bit of destruction like Musk buying Twitter?) If you buy a game you are voting with your dollar, if you subscribe they're going to make an Assassin's Creed game this year, and next year, and the year after that, and the year after that. The game industry is going to make whatever games it wants to make, and Microsoft will pay them, and I guess people will play them because they don't have a choice. We saw that with cable, since they get paid whether or not you watch, they can skimp on quality and collect increasing payments year after year. The movie and TV industry has been driven mad by streaming because suddenly performance matters... Disney is completely capable of producing a product that upholds it's brand but why do it when you can get $7 a month from every cable subscriber for ESPN whether or not they watch sports?
  - kbenson 3y ago
    I'm confused why you think they aren't tracking what games are played for how long, and won't optimize based on that. I would assume there's some royalty type situation with gamepass where the games that get played more get some percentage of a pool. You can rail about cable all you want, but some of the best shows of the last few decades were on cable. Breaking bad, mad men, the shield. Greatly expanding the choices allowed for networks to take risks in attempts to gain a small but I yerested audience, rather than having to appeal to the entire general public, and what we got was amazing.
    - smolder 3y ago
      More time spent does not equal enjoyment. Some games treat their players like employees and make them work pretty hard for their imaginary prizes. I wouldn't want a games library optimized for maximum time expenditure.
      - 3y ago

zopppo 3y ago

> Its extremely frustrating how we let the tech companies get to be this large, such that now we really have to consider blocking every acquisition, even though this one in particular I think wouldn't be all that bad and may actually be a positive for consumers. As an avid world of warcraft player, the community as a whole has been hoping the merger goes through for exactly this reason. Activision has seemingly forced through a lot of bad changes over the years to try wring out as much money as they can.

segasaturn 3y ago
I'm a part of the StarCraft 2 community and we were similarly hopeful about this deal as StarCraft has been neglected by the company for years. The community was already in full doom mode over Korean tournament funding getting pulled, this is not going to improve the atmosphere.
taeric 3y ago
I'm curious on how a MS merger would be good? At the start, they would almost certainly try to merge user accounts into MSN accounts. Likely force a migration down the line, after merging doesn't work.
- themitigating 3y ago
  If they merge user accounts but you can support for older products or other game changes it's possible people would be ok with that
  - taeric 3y ago
    Certainly many would be ok with it. The ones it will hurt will be the heavy users that have multiple accounts, is my guess. Also is annoying to families. Game accounts are just game accounts, even if that has grown. Giving the kids an MSN account did not sit well with me.
    - fbdab103 3y ago

dmonitor 3y ago

Xbox is loss leading hard for Microsoft right now. Profits are down, console sales are down, and things on the horizon are looking not too great. If Xbox spun off, they’d go out of business within the decade because there’s no reason to own one besides taking advantage of Microsoft’s net-negative gaming subscription.

davemp 3y ago
It seems like video game consoles aren't competing based on practicality (hardware) anymore and are mostly just rent seeking with ways to abuse the legal/IP system. There used to be a much bigger moat to assemble a platform that could play cutting edge games. Now PC game engines/graphics drivers are getting so good the console SDKs aren't such a big boon and the hardware is basically just CotS.
- dmonitor 3y ago
  Yeah. Sony and Nintendo still try to shake things up with their bespoke controllers and hardware doohickeys, but Microsoft's approach is just to release plain old PCs that only run their code.
  - seventhtiger 3y ago
    Nintendo would be successful even without hardware. Their IPs have firmly planted themselves in global awareness to an unimaginable level. They'd give Disney a run for their money. Then on top of that they built an ecosystem of toys and software to monetize their adoring customers. Nintendo recognized the deadend of the hardware race in the early 2000s, and continued developing their "mascots" while Sony and MS abandoned theirs. I don't think Microsoft and Sony have the DNA to pull of something like this. They are still software and hardware companies respectively.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]

mustacheemperor 3y ago

>has been one of maybe only a couple "great" stewards of the gaming industry for consumers I'm not sure I'd give them much credit on this, since MS/Xbox hasn't achieved much at all in the gaming industry over recent years. Maybe there's not much egregious evil there a-la Activision's leadership scandals, but the track record is not great. As a gaming industry consumer who's been playing Microsoft consoles and games my entire life, MS has recently: - Ruined the Halo franchise - Stymied the current console gen with the Series S' weak memory capabilities - Acquired multiple beloved studios and released little to nothing over 5+ years, with their highest profile release being Starfield, the game Bethesda was already developing when MS bought them and made it a platform exclusive - Edit: Forgot trying to turn the Xbox One into an always-online TV set-top box Spinning off Xbox might be a good idea, if it's MS' senior leadership that keeps hamstringing their success. Because if the Activision acquisition proceeded like their previous studio acquisitions, we would see one or two Activision games release in the next decade, along with maybe a mediocre COD TV show.

waboremo 3y ago
Xbox's role in the gaming industry has, funny enough, very little to do with Xbox itself. It's their competitive presence that has kept Playstation from stagnating and making terrible decisions. You can see this extremely clearly when the 360 was outselling the PS3 and Playstation/Sony made plenty of management changes to shift directions.
- mustacheemperor 3y ago
  I can agree there - MS has an important competitive role in the marketplace and it's not like Sony has always been a great steward to the community by comparison. I have mixed feelings about exclusives in general, but Sony has certainly played that game more than MS. But the 360 was unveiled in 2005 and was replaced in the market a decade ago. My criticisms are really oriented to the last 5-10 years. On that note, I'm reminded of the Xbox One "your game console is for watching TV and will always be connected to the internet" release. And in that generation, it was the clamoring market and Sony's response (like the classic 'how to share secondhand games' video[0]) that pushed Microsoft to stop acting unreasonably. [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48nCBnc9VBs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48nCBnc9VBs

waboremo 3y ago

Xbox is Microsoft's only consumer division that has substantial revenue. Even consumer office brings in half of what Xbox does. Microsoft is making the right moves here slowly shifting away from hardware (no profit) into software in the gaming space, but it's going to take some more time to do so. Potentially it makes more sense to drop xcloud (huge black hole for the next ~10 years), to adhere to CMA's claims of them dominating the cloud gaming space, so they can continue with Game Pass (the part that actually matters for Xbox).

stonemetal12 3y ago

Games aren't bad for MS, It brings in more than 3 billion a quarter. How many times have you seen I do most of my stuff on Linux but I still boot in to windows for games. An independent xbox would be less likely to use Windows for their OS.

InitialLastName 3y ago
Given how badly the Xbox for Windows system functions (lots of games don't even support the Xbox Series S/X controller reliably until you set them up to use Steam as their launcher), it already seems like the Xbox organization doesn't think much about Windows.

pb7 3y ago

>Epic is also a great company No, it's not. It does the exact same shit that Activision does except it targets an even younger more vulnerable demographic. Did you forget about this? https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2022/12/245-million-ftc-settlement-alleges-fortnite-owner-epic-games-used-digital-dark-patterns-charge https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2022/12/245-milli...

waboremo 3y ago
I wonder when the FTC is going to crack down on mobile gaming for this reason. Google and Apple profit tremendously from various companies targeting vulnerable demographics in their games.
- hnfong 3y ago
  Well, it's only a stupid authoritarian act when China does it...
015a 3y ago
I don't agree with the FTC's conclusion on that case, and while it doesn't reflect positively on Epic, its not nearly as negative as the myriad of things other gaming companies do on the regular (lootboxes being a big one, which are still very common in Activision, EA, & Valve games, among others). Epic is one of the good ones; that doesn't mean they always do good things.
- panopticon 3y ago
  > Epic is one of the good ones Maybe if your only comparison is Activision and EA. When you consider all the dark patterns Fortnite employs to encourage logging playtime and making purchases, they're only separated from those others by degrees. Stacked up against developers that largely avoid those patterns (FromSoft, Nintendo, CDPR, etc), Epic is most certainly closer to the "bad" side of the spectrum.
  - pb7 3y ago

giantg2 3y ago

"Its extremely frustrating how we let the tech companies get to be this large," With how quickly tech changes and the risks involved, companies have to find multiple revenue streams if they want to survive. Pretty much every startup dream is to one day become a huge company.

iepathos 3y ago

> spin-off Xbox into a separate company. I can't imagine the division is all that profitable only like $5 billion in annual revenue, doubt they'll want to let that go for no reason.

toyg 3y ago

> Activision is an unusually cruel and extremely horrible company, whereas the Xbox Division Even if this were true, there is no guarantee that the acquiring culture will actually be imposed on the acquired. In fact it's often the opposite, with the acquired "infecting" the parent company - particularly when the acquired comes with a large headcount.

7952 3y ago

I guess it could reduce the risk of another platform creating network effects.

munificent 3y ago

The solution to Activision being horrible shouldn't be to let it get eaten by a marginally less horrible even more giant company. It should be to break it into smaller pieces so that consumers have the flexibility to avoid the more toxic segments of the company and the market can decide whether their bad behavior matters or not.

augment003 3y ago
Why doesn’t the market just avoid the whole thing, which is toxic?

ldoughty 3y ago

Is part of what makes companies like this horrible the fact they WANT to get bought? The one company I have in depth knowledge of going through an acquisition tried to drive employees away where possible, and fire others, down to a skeleton crew of overworked disgruntled employees because it makes them look REALLY good in the short term for being acquired. If you couldn't count on acquisitions by larger companies being approved easily, the only other way to game companies can generate profit is by maintaining current games (at least to being playable, without terrible reviews from bugs), and /or develop new games...

greedo 3y ago
I was literally fired while recovering from cancer surgery because the company I worked for was selling itself to Wimba (who in turn was selling itself to Blackboard). My company wanted to reduce headcount to look better for Wimba. Screw those guys...