Well.
I don’t know or care about the industry. Execs can lick my dick;
Player-side we can expect half a dozen well-known IPs to become Microsoft-platform exclusive. Like locking players from using Wine/Proton and only working on XBox and Windows.
Mind you, talking about it selfishly… It will not affect me. The only game from Blizz I played in the past 15 years is StarCraft 2, and only for the campaign, and I finished that quite a while ago. And on Activision’s side there’s… Crash and Spyro. Kinda cool nostalgia-bait games but I can do without. Plus I doubt we’ll be seeing them again after the remakes from a couple years back.
I actually don’t play many “AAA” games. All the titles I played in the past 2 years, with the exception of the Zeldas and Baldur’s 3 have been either Low-Scale industry releases or straight up Indie projects.
Just more monopolies coming I’d wager. Disney is supposedly looking at buying EA. Microsoft and Sony have shown they both would rather buy companies and consolidate studios over how it was before.
As others have said it’ll be not good for the gamer/consumer. Nor will it be good for people working in the industry.
This is the correct answer. The same is playing out in so many other industries; the big players don’t bother innovating anymore, it’s easier to make more money by buying out their smaller competitors and essentially killing them by subsuming them.
Consumers have fewer and fewer real options for anything, everything costs more and more (the majority of current inflation is actually driven by execs realizing they can just raise prices and blame it on the “economy”), and the quality of everything is going down because why bother with quality when the goal is to make more money?
“But the free markets will solve this! A company making a better product will win over consumers!”, the market liberal says. “Oh, a competitor! We can’t have that, let’s buy them and make sure they can’t affect our bottom line” says the megacorp, and before you know it the “superior option” will have disappeared because producing it was 15% more expensive than producing shit.
Usually consolidation is done by expensive buy outs (which this one was). And if the company is public, the CEO’s next goal (since it now has valuable IP and has eliminated a competitor), is to make that money back and do so fast (see Disney with Marvel, Star Wars, etc.). This means exploiting its newest IP, farting out something that a known audience / fanbase will show up for (again - unfortunately - see Disney).
This doesn’t necessarily guarantee shitty outcomes (see Andor in the case of Star Wars being bought by Disney, see Overwatch after Activision bought Blizzard), but usually it comes with the territory of new bosses eventually trying to squeeze more value out of the IPs and team resources they purchased (see “Secret Invasion” by Marvel under Disney, and see “Overwatch 2” by Blizzard under Activision).
Depending on the company, they’ll also do MASS layoffs to “eliminate redundancies” - which in theory means firing people whose jobs encompass the exact same practice, but in reality means a bunch of people are about to have their work load doubled.
The people at the very top of the bought out company will get HUGE piles of cash, plus some requirements they stay on board usually for some amount of time… and then most of them will probably bail the moment their stock “vests” - allowing them to start up new companies and begin the cycle of “make stuff, then get bought out by big company” all over again.
Rarely a key person stays on board for some time (see Carmack with Facebook / Oculus for example), but eventually even the most passionate dev sees that their new bosses will never fully get behind them in the way they were able to do when they were not owned by said parent company.
From a broader “industry-wide” perspective, it’s probably not great either, because the mass layoffs at a gigantic well-regarded company means more workers competing across a mostly non-unionized industry for less jobs (and if you’re just starting, now you’ve got to compete with someone who has “Blizzard” on their resume).
Worse still - because the video game industry is already pretty exploitative of its workers, since it (like VFX) mostly came into being after the Reagan era completely destroyed the public perception of unions, the jobs everyone will be competing for will just have even worse conditions since soooooo many (younger folks especially) dream of working on video games (until they get their first industry job, get a few years under their belt, and been there for more than one studio closure and decide that - if they ever want to enjoy having time with their family, owning a home, and living somewhere for more than 5 years, they probably should change jobs to some relevant field in software dev that pays better, has less hours, and is overall more stable).
TL;DR - Probably bad.
It’s all for game pass. They want to lock people into their favourite games with a subscription, that’s where the money is for Xbox at the moment, all these buyouts are for securing their service as ‘the one to want’ before others clamber into the space. So I suspect things at ABK will continue as they have been doing for the most part, but with the games on game pass and maybe some more Xbox ports.
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If you want to know how Games Streaming will look like in 10 years, compare today’s YouTube to how it was 10 years ago.
The interface gets a little better and that’s it basically? (Alternatively: They try to spin a social medium around it and fail somewhat and succeed somewhat?)
Okay, Youtube was maybe a bad example. They aren’t that far with the enshittification yet, and just started increasing the amounts of ads…
Things I do expect:
- Price increase
- Tiered pricing (okay, that’s already a thing for GamePass with the “PC” and “Ultimate” plan)
- Lower price tiers including advertisements (could for instance be placed in games streamed from the cloud)
- Other things that aren’t beneficial for consumers.
At first, I was somewhat surprised that this was even a question - then I reminded myself that they’re asking how the merger will affect the industry, not the players.
I don’t care how it affects the industry. I’m not a high-level executive with a gaming company. Are you?
For the players, I don’t think it’ll be that great. Whatever savings are made due to the merger won’t be passed on to us. They never are. What’s good for players is competition between many companies, all doing their best to attract customers. An enormous, monolithic conglomerate will do us no favors.
Depends on your definition of savings, if the entire actblizz catalog ends up on gamepass then it’s a huge savings for gamepass subscribers.
…for now. This is actually why I don’t like that this merger has gone through. My guess is the strategy will be spending the next few years making GamePass such a value that it’s basically a must-have and dominates the market. Then they start jacking prices up and ruining the service.
That will likely happen, maybe. We really don’t know until it happens.
You really don’t know the history of Microsoft, do you?
I said it would likely happen, I wasn’t denying it.
Can they please fix Overwatch 2 so it’s actually playable now? Or better yet just bring back Overwatch 1
Just move on, what has been lost there can never be restored.
The only Activision game I care about is WoW, but the game changed so much in a niche hardcore direction that even with Microsoft owning them, my hope is very limited about the game, probably I’ll never play again.
Right!? Was telling my partner the only game I’ve had more fun in than BG3 was WoW. When she asked why dont i play it, i had to explain how the WoW i feel in love with doesnt exist anymore. I played Vanilla extensively and never made it to the max level and had so much fun exploring and doing wpvp against characters my level, it was insanely fun. I had to quit cause i ruined my computer with Limewire, and picked it up again in the Cata expansion and the game was a shadow of what it used to be. Felt like it was a rush to max level and the soul of the game had been ripped out…
WoW is just pointless errands now. It’s so bad. All the things that made if fun have been removed or minimized. I don’t think I’ll ever return to it after Dragonflight. I’d rather wash my sink full of dishes than do another pointless grind. Vanilla wow back in the day was something truly special. It’s gone now, it won’t be back but I’m lucky I got to experience it before it soured.
