I don’t follow the game industry closely but I had no idea they were with nearly that much. That’s about 17 times as much as what Disney paid for Lucasfilm in 2012. Or about 6 times the total North American Box Office movie ticket sales in 2019.
More likely Satya has spent 63 billion in-game on Candy Crush and wants some of that money back!
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If you look up the major IP’s that AB owns, and flip through the monthly active player stats, you’ll start to get it. Just the top 10 most played games this week on that second link, numbers 1, 4 and 8 are AB properties.
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why not both? 
my take is: they are a giant for profit company with a history of questionable market behavior. with the satya’s push to become more of a software service company than a software product company having proven ways to churn content seems financial smart though - at the expense of workers - morally bankrupt
and yeah. when it comes to candy crush, war games rules apply. the only way to win is not to play the game
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Meanwhile Nintendo is still trying to make a gamepass of their own made of tin cans, string and poorly emulated N64 games.
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Microsoft should really give them 2 billion dollars to let them put game pass on Switch
ETA: I did like what Patrick klepick at waypoint said about the acquisition from a content standpoint. It makes sense in that game pass does not require good - just good enough
It didn’t go well the first time they tried that
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Oh, I’m not talking about acquiring Nintendo that would never happen. Just give them 2 billion dollars to let you put a game pass streaming app on the switch
Pretty much the same thing as what’s going on with brand new Bethesda games like Starfield (the sci fi successor to Elder Scrolls).
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It was my limited understanding that the antitrust case against M$ way back so scared them that they passed up the chance of purchasing the Android OS but the M$ of today makes the M$ of then look like a chancer. That and the fear of ever letting Gates be in a disastrous video deposition.
It’s complicated. There has been a cultural shift away from the cutthroat Microsoft of the past. The Satya era is one where diversity & inclusion are a priority, and the cutthroat behavior is no longer in vogue, in favor of a more collaborative culture.
When it comes down to business goals, it’s less now trying to come out with an MSFT version of everything and “embrace, extend, extinguish” but there’s business units which are still clearly operating in that mode. See: Edge browser links kerfuffle.
Antitrust enforcement has gotten ever more lax. So yeah, things like the edge browser links thing they would never have attempted 10 years ago.
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The way M$ have been buying up gaming companies left, right and centre and seemingly treating customers with contempt who have the cheek to want an OS that works for them and not delivered as a service looks just as cut-throat to me, regardless of how supposedly diverse and inclusive their workplace may be. I agree though that antitrust has been completely de-fanged over the years and the aggressive pushing of the Edge browser is no different to why they got in hot water with the DoJ in the first place.
Sure, there’s still examples of cutthroat behavior. But mostly, I think people forget how bad it was before. Consider this: Microsoft is no longer trying to snuff out other browsers and OS’s, and is now actively building stuff which improves those other platforms. They gave up on the “intentionally flawed web standards implementation” game when they adopted Chromium for Edge. They brought out lots of great cross platform stuff, some of which they open sourced for everyone to use, .Net Core, VSCode, all their Azure SDK’s, etc. All of that stuff would be unthinkable to a person in 2010. You’d never have believed it.
I would agree that the Windows product line is still the most questionable when it comes to screwing people over. I think Win 10 (and 11) are pretty amazing from a technical perspective, but have huge issues when it comes to privacy and also deprecating (or removing) features which I am guessing they figure 90% of users don’t use.
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re the tweet’s “be more clear.” - a good take i heard was that a big anti trust hurdle for them will likely be: is all this existing ip going to become xbox only.
if the answer is yes, then that might scuttle the deal. so they have to at least look like the answer at least could be no
as long as they aren’t forced to put anything in writing about it, they can always lock it down later
Yeah, I wouldn’t count on that.
This compares to Sony’s 17 studios: Upon close, Microsoft will have 30 internal game development studios
Every gaming conglomerate has a graveyard of great studios. Sony has 17 studios that have already integrated and found their place within Sony. Microsoft just absorbed a giant number of studies. What did they have two years ago? 3 or 4? I know when I’ve been at companies that have been acquired I’ve looked at other places just to avoid the transition.
It’s cool to see Sony releasing their exclusives on PC after a few years.
See! He cares.
As reported by The Washington Post, the meeting, which was scheduled to last half an hour and was billed as a ‘fireside chat’, allegedly only lasted 16 minutes after Kotick himself turned up seven minutes late and finished the meeting early.
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At least recent statements say that he will be leaving when the deal closes on 2021 (with $250 million dollars)
See, the system works! /s
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We are nearly 40 posts into that topic and noone mentioned that M$ just literally moved at least two full truckloads of dollar bills for this?
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