Microsoft acquire Activision

Alexrose1uk

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chrcoluk said:
Its only CoD, dont see it as a big deal.
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Only Call of Duty?
It's Spyro, Warcraft, Starcraft, Crash Bandicoot, Call of Duty, Diablo and many others. This is huge.

Even though World of Warcraft is not the big ticket it once was; that alone is MILLIONS a year. Throw on top the rights to develop this and all the other popular franchises and IPs; and gain access to the teams at Activision Publishing, Blizzard Entertainment, Beenox, Demonware, Digital Legends, High Moon Studios, Infinity Ward, King, Major League Gaming, Radical Entertainment, Raven Software, Sledgehammer Games, Toys for Bob, Treyarch etc

I mean, the teams there have worked across a HUGE range of games, from World of Warcraft, through Quake. There is a massive amount of franchise and developer experience pools they've just picked up; and will be able to use in any way they wish; whether to continue to work independently or have them assist (or be assisted) by other teams within thier developer portfolio.
 

chrcoluk

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Alexrose1uk said:
Only Call of Duty?
It's Spyro, Warcraft, Starcraft, Crash Bandicoot, Call of Duty, Diablo and many others. This is huge.

Even though World of Warcraft is not the big ticket it once was; that alone is MILLIONS a year. Throw on top the rights to develop this and all the other popular franchises and IPs; and gain access to the teams at Activision Publishing, Blizzard Entertainment, Beenox, Demonware, Digital Legends, High Moon Studios, Infinity Ward, King, Major League Gaming, Radical Entertainment, Raven Software, Sledgehammer Games, Toys for Bob, Treyarch etc

I mean, the teams there have worked across a HUGE range of games, from World of Warcraft, through Quake. There is a massive amount of franchise and developer experience pools they've just picked up; and will be able to use in any way they wish; whether to continue to work independently or have them assist (or be assisted) by other teams within thier developer portfolio.
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I did say modern games, unless you mean World of Warcraft a MMO which currently has players emigrating en masse? The actual RTS Warcraft game suite has had no updates for decades.

Wasnt aware they owned some platformer IPs as well though, but yeah I acknowledge in terms of player base it is very big.
 

Alexrose1uk

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chrcoluk said:
I did say modern games, unless you mean World of Warcraft a MMO which currently has players emigrating en masse? The actual RTS Warcraft game suite has had no updates for decades.

Wasnt aware they owned some platformer IPs as well though, but yeah I acknowledge in terms of player base it is very big.
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It does because of the politics and toxic workspace issues; even so, the game still makes MILLIONS on a per year basis. Microsoft is one of the few entities in this space large enough to actually do some good to right this ship as well. Not to mention, again, its all the IP and franchises and experience they pick up; and all the additional resources they can funnel around to make necessary improvements; you now have the teams responsible for the likes of Age of Empires and Warcraft under one roof; there are many, many sybiotic things that could happen here. Yes, this deal will take some time to close; and more time than that to actually bear fruit and to potentially change directions; but you cannot say that all this additional franchise and IP, which Microsoft can now use AS IT WISHES, will not have long reaching impacts; not to mention they can now reassign those IPs to other studios, if they feel the original studios are not doing them justice and need some time away to refresh.

This in itself can sometimes work wonders; you only have to look at Retro Studio's Metroid Prime take on the Metroid franchise away from Nintendo inhouse, to see the sort of things that can happen here.

The real value to Microsoft here is not the management or the individual studios, its the collective massed experience development staff, and the franchises and IP they have just agreed to take control of.
 

chrcoluk

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I think I will backtrack on the not big thing, it was originally intended as a joke as I dont rate activision as a company, I see them as someone who doesnt offer any good games, but yeah its massive in terms of the acquisition. :)

On the subject of this is bad for the gaming industry, the times ahead are concerning, in the PC space we have EPIC trying to make everything exclusive, and now we seem to have a new console war with buying up content.
 

Alexrose1uk

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chrcoluk said:
I think I will backtrack on the not big thing, it was originally intended as a joke as I dont rate activision as a company, I see them as someone who doesnt offer any good games, but yeah its massive in terms of the acquisition. :)

On the subject of this is bad for the gaming industry, the times ahead are concerning, in the PC space we have EPIC trying to make everything exclusive, and now we seem to have a new console war with buying up content.
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I don't think the joke came across well :D yes, I don't massively rate Call of Duty personally, but this is a massive aquisition, even bigger than Bethesda/Zenimax IMO.

The times ahead are concerning, I don't want to see a push towards everything being monopolised, or moving towards endless DLCs, or mobile style freemium games; that said I think the concept of a Netflix for games is a long time coming; I'm just being glad it's being done by an entity big enough to fund it adequately. In a way; this move by Microsoft in a way actually counteracts Epic; as there is no way Microsoft will allow any franchises it owns to be tied to a single launcher or market like Epic's!

They also seem to have given up on the concept of Microsoft Store beating the likes of Steam etc; so this is actually maybe not a bad thing; it will help keep Tencent at bay.
 

Raymond Lin

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ic1male said:
Getting EA and FIFA/Madden exclusive would be a massive blow to PlayStation.
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I don't think they will make those games Xbox Exclusives, but even things like feature exclusive will shift a lot of players to xbox. Whilst still reaping in all the sales for the release in Playstation. Can you imagine Ultimate Teams is an Xbox Exclusive ?
 

dannyjo22

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There’s no way they will be Xbox exclusives. I think cross platform gaming and increasing revenue on rival hardware is the only way these buys make sense. How else are they going to pay for it? Game pass?

The new consoles aren’t able to sell in anything like decent numbers, I can’t see game pass being cheap for much longer.
 

CaptainRAVE

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Thinking about it, with all the biggest hitters like Halo, Doom, Call of Duty and Overwatch they now basically own the genre. Like they did with RPGs…

I doubt they’d all be exclusives.
 

Mesai

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bingham67 said:
Hopefully this gives Call of Duty a reboot its become so stale over the years even Warzone is boring now.
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Doubt much will change in that respect. It's just an income engine for Microsoft now.

Activision and Blizzard are pretty trash in terms of management though, so maybe if that changes we'll see some game changes.
 
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