it’s just so funny to me that candy crush is both presented among all of those ips as an equally important acquisition and that it’s likely still raking in more profit than the rest of them combined on a daily basis.
anyways this shit sucks
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helo evrybody pls read my fnafic where daddy phil spencer spanks little bobby kotick for being a naughty boy okay its gonna hapen im telling u now
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Bobby thee koTick
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Call of Candy Crashcraft World… craft(ing). 
This moves games from maybe 20% along the road to Netflix & Disney+ to maybe 80%. Leaves us with, what, three big western publishers in traditional game publishing? EA, Take Two, Ubisoft? Then there’s the much smaller Japanese publishers, Square Enix, Capcom? Also-rans like Sega and Warner Bros. and outside that, you’re looking at AA and smaller.
Phil has a lot of rope because his boss believes in Game Pass but a huge chunk of Activision’s value is in King games, and I don’t know what Microsoft would want or do with that.
Plus, as noted, there’s the ongoing labor and abuse disputes that Activision is drawing. Under the House of Spencer, Microsoft’s acquisitions strategy has been to tell studios what they need on Game Pass (long term play, genre niches) and then give them a bigger budget to achieve that and leave them alone. Taking on Activision is like turning the burning dumpster over to your lap to pick through it. They might be hoping that if they force a change in publisher leadership they can cut off a lot of the attention but rebuilding trust with their employees is going to take years and years.
Wow.
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Continue pre-installing it on Windows machines and make even more $$$
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There’s really no reason not to look at it as the inheritor of Microsoft Solitaire.
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I got a bad feeling when both Larian and IO moved on from reinventing themselves over the preceding 5 years to working on licensed stuff (which will be fine and I will play) pretty much concurrently
everything’s ending here etc
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I assume this quashes any kind of unionization momentum going on at ActiBlizz (not sure how that was going in the first place).
I wonder who MS is going to snatch up on the Japanese side. Maybe they’ll surprise everyone and get Koei-Tecmo. Get us a Halo Musou, add Cortana to Blue Reflection 3, and re-theme Romance of the Three Kingdoms into a Tony Hawk skate park game.
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$69b for Call of Duty (basically)? Seems like they coulda bought Capcom, Sega or Square-Enix (which includes Eidos) and gotten way more games instead. I’m no CEO though.
I had really seen much talk about the problems of the game pass model until today. Much like my account*, I kind of forget it exists but it still sucks up money like crazy.
*Seriously, I signed up right around the beginning of the pandemic to play the old 360 Perfect Dark online with a friend, and besides trying the new Mechwarrior, haven’t been using it.
Heh, I don’t share that sort of pessimism - midbudget is healthier than it’s been since the early '90s, commercial indie scene continues to pop out brand new things several times a year even as it becomes more crowded. The art scene is really struggling for lack of discourse and attention and the high budget scene does seem pretty bleak right now – the designs are better but the project choices feel as constrained as they did in 2010 or 2011.
Larian and IO are in the shadow realm of the bottom tier of high budget, Larian ascending and IO descending. Tough space to be.
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fun fact: Koei Tecmo’s market cap is roughly the same or larger than Square Enix’s
don’t see anyone tooting their horn though
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I wholeheartedly agreed with this as recently as 2019, I’m not quite sure what’s going on at the moment beyond a lot of people drawing entry level salaries to at least make stuff
Well, I can tell you from personal experience that it’s never been easier to get a budget between $1m and $25m…
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All that DLC money has to end up somewhere.
look, all I’m saying is if Squenix can afford to weather an underperformer like Avengers, KT can help me out and let me buy Winning Post 9 on Steam
honestly looking very forward to see what the results of this ecosystem start looking like in a couple years; right now I don’t feel I have a good sense of it and most of what’s been obviously funded to bolster apple or microsoft’s libraries has not been terribly compelling to me even against e.g. Sony’s Unity-era indie push, or for that matter the slow trickle of kickstarter projects being hammered into something really endearing like Wreckfest
You never know what Steam and the back half of console stores will throw up but I think the midbudgets are best at exploring a known concept in depth inside a niche genre or excelling in a specific area rather than being broadly new. I don’t have a broad scene-trends view at that scale other than, “still going, still lots of chances, let’s see what pops up”. Obviously the trend towards commercial- and Nintendo-ization Liz has talked about continues apace in micro-budget indies and that’s a real problem.
I’ve been using Eastward as a game to fall asleep to for the past 4 months. And it’s consistently astoundingly gorgeous even as the writing has been revealed as nothing more than a Mother 3 affect and the dungeon sections are just limp. Half-asleep might be the best frame of mind for a certain type of Microsoft-appealing Zelda-like…
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