Microsoft To Buy Activision Blizzard in $69 Billion Video Game Mega-Deal (hollywoodreporter.com) 201
Microsoft will buy the video game publisher Activision Blizzard in a $69 billion deal that would reshape the gaming landscape. From a report: The deal, if completed, would bring together Microsoft, which owns the Xbox game platform and the Xbox Game Studios (which owns Bethesda Softworks and 343 Industries, among other game publishers) and Activision, owner of the Call of Duty, Warcraft and Tony Hawk franchises, among others. Microsoft will become the world's third-largest gaming company by revenue, behind Tencent and Sony, when and if the deal closes.
The deal comes as Activision Blizzard grapples with its own #MeToo reckoning, spurring dueling investigations from the state of California and federal agencies. The company was accused of rampant sexual harassment and discrimination involving alcohol-fueled parties, male employees allegedly joking about rape, a female employee who died of suicide after colleagues shared a nude photo and a so-called "Cosby Suite" because the executive who worked there had earned a reputation for unwanted sexual advances.
The deal comes as Activision Blizzard grapples with its own #MeToo reckoning, spurring dueling investigations from the state of California and federal agencies. The company was accused of rampant sexual harassment and discrimination involving alcohol-fueled parties, male employees allegedly joking about rape, a female employee who died of suicide after colleagues shared a nude photo and a so-called "Cosby Suite" because the executive who worked there had earned a reputation for unwanted sexual advances.
That's an odd purchase (Score:2)
Isn't Activision Blizzard currently valued at something like $50bn?
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Re:That's an odd purchase (Score:5, Funny)
Microsoft could only get it off the Apple Store.
Re:No (Score:5, Informative)
Console makers should not be permitted to buy/sell games/studios fior the same reason streaming services shouldn't be permitted to create content. Monopolization.
You'd have a point if it weren't for the fact that Microsoft have X-Cloud as part of their Gamepass service which allows you to game on absolutely anything at all as long as it uses a web-browser capable of running it, including Android, Apple, Mac OS, Linux and not just Windows and Xbox. Microsoft have openly stated their goal is to have people be able to run any of their studio's games on any platform. They moved on from "exclusively on Xbox" a few years ago.
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How is that an answer? So, in addition to reducing native implementations for competing game platforms, they also get to shore up their cloud-based platform. Two monopolization birds with one stone...
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They also serve up games from all sorts of competitors. EA, Ubisoft, etc.
They are providing a service, not a monopoly. They also want(ed) to host Sony's streaming platform.
You're barking up the wrong tree if you are looking for a monopoly here. They are trying to do the opposite, to provide their services to other publishers, and to provide as many games to their consumers as possible.
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For now.
Embrace, extend, extinguish.
will laws coveing live sports hit gameing neutrali (Score:2)
will laws covering live sports steaming hit gaming under any network neutrality? / program access laws?
Right now there laws saying that there are no terrestrial exception like the old CSN Philly used to used will laws like that come to ISP's to ban exclusives? and based on how laws are written it may not only ban ISP's exclusives but also ban some Steaming exclusives as well.
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Check how Porsche couldn't take over Volkswagen - https://medium.com/@amateurana... [medium.com].
Basically the "market valuation" is an imaginary number obtained by the price the last action was sold, times the total number of actions.
It is imaginary because:
- some owners will simply not sell (in the case of Porsche-Volkswagen failed takeover, 20% of VW was actually owned by the Lower Saxony land, somewhat equivalent to a US state. It would not have sold anything, and it would not have played its shares in any way on a
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With a controlling interest, they can force the sale of your shares. This has happened to me a couple times over the years...Avanir was bought up, and more recently Stamps.com
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The point is that if the holdouts comprise over 50% of the company, then you have to deal with them.
Buying 1% of a company? Probably doable at a slight premium to the current share price. 51%? You are going to bump into varying degrees of 'not willing to sell at market price'
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I think I clearly said "with a controlling interest".
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With a controlling interest, force the sale of shares owned by the regional government? Really?
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First of all, I'm not sure why the Porsche/VW deal is applicable to the overall discussion. Second, why is local government owning shares? Third, are they treated any differently than if owned privately?
My point was in regard to the Activision/MSFT case, or any publicly traded company on the NYSE, NASDAQ, etc., here in the US.
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You act like they have a choice. In 90% of these deals the shares go *POOF* and investors are left like a mafia with a recently deceased boss trying to figure out who is in charge or maintains majority control.
And right after these situations the stock is almost always not sell-able while locked into these arrangements.
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this is why they have to offer a premium over the current market price
Also, there is a shareholder vote to either approve or block the deal. A simple majority is usually required, so that either all or no shares end up being sold.
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That's about right. If you want to buy 1/750 millionth of Activision it costs you about sixty bucks. If you want to buy a controlling interest and actually run the thing, you pay a little more.
Re:That's an odd purchase (Score:5, Insightful)
They bought Bethesda semi-recently too, who had already bought id and others. I don't know how the fuck mickeysoft always avoids any real anti-trust scrutiny.
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They will just do what they did in the 1990's, hold up the debate in the courts, if a verdict goes ageist them they will be slow to pay out, and lobby the next administration to get them out.
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Because there are literally hundreds of game publishers, and the barrier to entry is not terribly high.
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This is exactly the same reason why movie studios were once prevented from owning theaters. [wikipedia.org] This is just more extreme vertical integration at everyone else's expense.
Re:That's an odd purchase (Score:5, Insightful)
and the barrier to entry is not terribly high.
Wrong.
It's a common misconception that the theoretical ability to enter a market is what's meant by "barrier to entry". That's not true.
You can absolutely go an compete with Amazon today. Start a webshop and send parcels with stuff to people. Not hard, right?
Well, that is until you actually compete in the market not just have it as a hobby. Then suddenly things are very different and you quickly figure out that... well, you just can't compete. You'll be undercut, outbid and driven into bancruptcy.
"barrier to entry" doesn't mean "can I publish a game in my spare time and sell 20 copies of it?". It means can you survive as a business, with rent to pay and employees that expect a salary every month, and do you have a realistic chance at growing into some percent of market share if you are successful.
The big boys dominating the market and setting a tiny corner aside for the pro-forma competitors to play in isn't what the free market or the concept of capitalism before neo-liberalism took over is all about. The 101 that's taught in university still assumes large numbers of buyers and sellers, otherwise the economics prof would have to admit that his whole theory doesn't actually work.
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"barrier to entry" doesn't mean "can I publish a game in my spare time and sell 20 copies of it?". It means can you survive as a business, with rent to pay and employees that expect a salary every month, and do you have a realistic chance at growing into some percent of market share if you are successful.
Except what you define as the "market" may not be what the OP defines as the market developers want to enter. Your definition is only a huge multinational corporation game publisher (AAA) that makes billions a year in revenue. A game developer may only be developing games as a hobby to earn some money.
For the point of the OP is "Are there enough game publishers that still exist such that MS buying Activision Blizzard does not harm competition in the market?" For games developers, the answer is still, yes,
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Have you ever used Steam? There are literally thousands of independent developers selling games there. Many of the most innovative games of the last decade were from independent developers. To name a few: Valheim, Terraria, FTL, Stardew Valley, Kingdom Come Deliverance, Witcher 3 (CD Projekt was a relatively unknown studio prior to Witcher 3's smash success).
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Because there are literally hundreds of game publishers, and the barrier to entry is not terribly high.
What? There's not many markets harder to enter successfully.
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Because there are literally hundreds of game publishers, and the barrier to entry is not terribly high.
The market here is "AAA console videogames", not self-published game jam entry on itch.io. The barrier to entry is enormous. These games cost $100s of millions to billions to make. Take a look at the credits on a major videogame release someday: they are longer than most Hollywood blockbuster movies. There are fewer than a dozen publishers that take on projects of this size. MS was one, and they now own Bethesda and Activision.
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I don't know how the fuck mickeysoft always avoids any real anti-trust scrutiny.
Lobbyists [opensecrets.org]. They learned their lesson after their anti-trust suit [wired.com].
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Do those studios go XBOX exclusive after being bought, or do they continue to make Playstation versions of the games?
Then again, as TFA notes, even after this acquisition Microsoft is still number 3, behind Sony and Tencent. So if anyone is at risk of anti-trust scrutiny it ought to be Sony.
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Bungie did. It was originally going to be a simultaneous release to both Mac and PC... and was running fantastically on Macs when demoed at Macworld. Then came the acquisition, and the Mac version of Halo disappeared. They did eventually release an intentionally-crippled (It's not like they could claim porting difficulties. The better-performing Mac code base was literally already there when they bought it!) Mac release. But they rigged it to be so bad as to not be worth buying. There's also Bethesda
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They bought Bethesda semi-recently too, who had already bought id and others. I don't know how the fuck mickeysoft always avoids any real anti-trust scrutiny.
My first thought was also, wow! First Bethesda, now Activision Blizzard! MS is a gaming behemoth at this point!
But then I read in the article how they are still "only" third place behind Tencent and Sony, and I was wowed again. I had no idea these two companies were so huge in gaming.
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That's how buyouts work. You can't buy all shares of a company at the listed stock price, since they won't be at that price for more than 5 minutes.
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Wrap it with std::atomic :)
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Of course, this assumes that there are even 51% of shares actively for sale at that price. You have to find the cheapest 51% of shares to acquire, with the 'market price' being only actually applicable to the cheapest shares.
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They may not have wanted to be purchased by Microsoft, so they risen the price.
Also the market valuation is often (very rudimentary) the price of the stock*number of stock sold. So If Microsoft were to buy 50.0001% of the stock, they could do a hostile takeover, at close to 25bn. however, if you see a lot of purchasing of the stock to do such a take over the stock price will rise like crazy so Microsoft may be paying even more for the company.
Also normally buyouts happen for greater than the company val
Purchase Price (Score:2)
The purchase price of a company is, generally, it's operating profit over two or three years, plus it's assets, minus it's liabilities, with additions or subtractions for if the deal is in cash or not. Again, as a general rule of thumb.
Stock price is general the value of the company plus or minus a bunch of intangibles. If, say, there is a scandal happening at the company, that would affect it's stock price. There is an investment strategy that "rides scandals" and buys after the stock tanks after some bad
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Someone below is saying that ATVI is building their stock price; that's not what happened. As soon as a deal is announced, the stock price increases relative to the new offer price, because if som
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With M&A, you're never paying for the current value; you're always paying for some version of a future value. What that exact future version looks like is what the M&A process is all about. For example, Microsoft might think Activision Blizzard's future earnings, etc. warrant a 10% premium over current value, whereas Activision Blizzard think it warrants a 50% premium. They'll negotiate to somewhere in the middle, but there's almost always a premium because both sides think there's future value to b
The execs have given up (Score:5, Informative)
I think they realised the dev exodus, awful PR with all the grossly inappropriate behaviour of certain high ranking individuals cannot be salvaged.
It's fair to say Microsoft will be a better employer and is more likely to attract new and old dev talent.
What is the takeaway? At long last we will have Starcraft 3
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An XBOX LIVE exclusive! Fuck Microsoft.
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I could imagine Starcraft 3 being a Windows exclusive, but it hardly makes sense to keep it off mac, since the nonavailability of SC3 would hardly cause mac users to switch to Windows.
age of empires in steam so XBOX / win store only (Score:2)
age of empires in steam so XBOX / windows store only is very unlikely
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$69 billion seems like a lot to pay for a studio in crisis. A quick search shows they had revenue of about $8bn in 2020, before all this kicked off.
I guess they must value the franchises very heavily.
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$69 billion seems like a lot to pay for a studio in crisis. A quick search shows they had revenue of about $8bn in 2020, before all this kicked off.
I guess they must value the franchises very heavily.
COD and Starcraft will be worth that alone.
$69 billion is an auspicious number for a studio with multiple sexual harassment allegations though.
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$69 billion seems like a lot to pay for a studio in crisis. A quick search shows they had revenue of about $8bn in 2020, before all this kicked off.
I guess they must value the franchises very heavily.
Hardly. They have a market capitalization of ~$65B, with a PE of ~25, and an excellent revenue stream. $4B over market is a good deal for any buyer. Share price bottomed around Dec 10, and has been recovering ever since. They paid out $18M to satisfy the EEOC, and still have some lawsuits (State of CA for one), but the liability doesn't sound that steep. Yes, they've lost some of their creative talent, but they've also been relying on income from old content.
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I have played Diablo and World of Warcraft on Linux using Lutris. It works great! I fear that Microsoft will roll right in and ruin that. :(
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> At long last we will have Starcraft 3
Nope. We've been here before. Remember when they sank their fangs into Bungie... another studio that used to be known for multiplatform gaming? The xBox will have Starcraft 3. And then, several years later, the rest of us *might* see an intentionally-poorly-done port created to try to trick people into thinking that any platform but xBox was incapable of handling it. (Even though Halo had already been demoed at Macworld, looking amazing.)
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I'd say the execs are trying to find a way to deal with Kotick.
Not a chance (Score:2)
It's gonna hurt Sony bad. They've tried and failed to make COD killers. The Japanese never could get the hang of FPSes, and they studios they've bought to make them turn out so-so games.
I guess they're Battlefield.... I can't even get up the energy to laugh at that one.
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What is the takeaway? At long last we will have Starcraft 3
When Starcraft 2 rolled out with Facebook integration I kind of had to write off the entire franchise as lost.
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What would Starfield have to do with this? It's been in development for years now. You might as well say "nope, age of empires"
First Bethesda... (Score:3)
now Blizzard. This is starting to feel like game development companies are merging into the same type of bucket as internet or mobile phone providers... bad, horrible and spawn of the devil. At least I can play indie games while I ignore more and more big name developers...
Re:First Bethesda... (Score:5, Informative)
Don't forget Bungie, Ensemble Studios: both acquired by Microsoft and destroyed.
Don't forget Mojang and Bethesda.
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How did they destroy Bethesda? Did they release an underwhelming TES 6? *joking*
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It's pretty punny (Score:2)
given the company's reputation.
The amount figures (Score:5, Funny)
Of course Activision's current management asked for 69 billion dollars. Totally on-brand...
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They should have asked for 77 and gotten ate more.
The market isn't evne open yet and the (Score:2)
"extended" hours trading has already pushed ATVI up nearly $35/share almost to where the deal buyout will be. It must be nice to have the ability to make free, effortless money so easily.
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oh goody (Score:2)
I swore off buying anything from Activeturd a long time back because they are such sleazebags.
Being bought out by the biggest distributor of spyware on the planet will change nothing.
fuck them (Score:2)
They're really the Borg. Can't they just leave something alone instead of fucking it up?
Yes, I'm still angry about Bungie and Bethesda. Don't much care about this one, but the sum total of it all. Who in this world wants MS to be this big? Nobody, that's who.
Am I the only one excited? (Score:3, Interesting)
Today's Microsoft seems like a pretty good steward. I think the Disney/Marvel/Lucasfilm mergers are great parallels. Lucasfilm had been quite underwhelming when it was purchased and Disney pumped a ton of money into it with both successes, like the Mandalorian and Book of Boba Fett and what I would consider a miss (the Skywalker Saga), but they're taking it more seriously than Lucas did after his prequels. Disney also did a great job with Marvel, despite their past reputation. From what I could tell, they were pretty hands off and let the creative folks make them a ton of money.
The 1st party games from MS Studios are generally a lot of fun, have big budgets and lots of marketing. For example, I don't LOVE Gears of War or Halo, I have a ton of fun playing them...very disposable entertainment, similar to a Marvel movie. It won't blow my mind and probably won't be memorable, but it will be consistently entertaining. While some are obviously better than others, no studio has a midas touch. All studios have hits and misses. People complaining about their purchase of Bungee have to remember MS doesn't micromanager, just pump in money and market the product. Whichever game you hated probably had a lot more to do with Bungee than MS.
This is not the Ballmer/Gates days. Today's MS just wants to make money, not control you. It looks like they really want to be the Netflix + HBOMax of gaming and collect recurring revenue by keeping you happy.
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On Slashdot, probably.
I've just checked out the procedure to delete my Battlenet account. If this deal happens then I'll be saying bye to a small games collection.
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Today's Microsoft seems like a pretty good steward. I think the Disney/Marvel/Lucasfilm mergers are great parallels.
That's what we're afraid of.
the Mandalorian and Book of Boba Fett
Boba Fett has already jumped the shark/sarlacc.
Disney also did a great job with Marvel, despite their past reputation. From what I could tell, they were pretty hands off and let the creative folks make them a ton of money.
Everything that started production post-Disney has been shite and the MCU is for all intents and purposes dead, barring a miracle.
This is not the Ballmer/Gates days. Today's MS just wants to make money, not control you.
No, it wants both.
Ultimately, MS could just have decided to compete. Hire talent. Be creative. But that's hard work. Easier to get rid of the competition completely.
Activision isn't the competition, Netflix is (Score:5, Insightful)
Ultimately, MS could just have decided to compete. Hire talent. Be creative. But that's hard work. Easier to get rid of the competition completely.
Are they getting rid of the competition or simply hoping to make money off them and secure top games for the Games Pass? As you said, it's easier to buy studios that make great games, but bad financial and management decisions than organically come up with new IP. I'm OK with that, personally. Eventually, these subsidiaries have to make new IP and if they don't smaller, hungrier ones will.
I'd predict that MS isn't interested in selling you disks or one-time downloads, but wants to collect recurring revenue. IMO, the future is Games Pass and MS knows this. I'm never paying $60 for any game. However, I'll gladly pay $10/month for a ton of great games for me and my kids. Hell, how many people sign up for these things and forget to cancel when they stop using it?
Activision/Blizzard isn't their competition. Netflix is. MS knows this. You're viewing the old world. I think MS is viewing the way I do. MS is not just competing against PS5. They're competing for my time and attention. They're competing against HBOMax/Netflix. They're competing against porn. They're competing against productive hobbies or me cleaning the house. They're competing with me putting effort into getting laid by my wife. IMO, that's why they're pushing the Games Pass and doing all they can to make it the best. That's why they introduced a brand new console at $300. That is why they're pushing streaming. I think a natural next step is to provide a subscription to games my wife would want to play on her iPad. I think they want to be an integral part of your life, like Netflix, not just the realm of hardcore enthusiastic gamers
IMO, they will soon start expanding to family/casual gaming....first on console and then on mobile via native apps or streaming. Apple got there first with Apple Arcade, but are really sucking at it so far. I just got 3 months of free Apple Arcade & haven't seen a single app I'm remotely interested in playing. Games Pass? My "Play Next" list is about 2 dozen titles...realistically more than I can ever find time to play.
So yeah, I think the MS Gaming tent is about to get a lot bigger and I am personally excited about it.
Microsoft? let the layoffs begin (Score:2)
Blizzard Activision were already gone (Score:2)
Games used to be made so they were fun to play, not so they could make money. They people who ran the whole show were game developers not businessmen. Now games are built to make money first and be fun second. Game studios are strictly business now and buyouts are a reminder
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Yeah, and all the idiots are excited about MS cleaning house, but what they want cleaned (and what MS will do) is squash the last remaining boy's club culture, the remnant of the culture that cared about games being fun. The culture of soulless, money grubbing executives? Nah, that stays. Get rid of Kotick, who cares, MS will find someone worse.
The End of WoW (Score:2)
I've played WoW since it was in beta. I fully expect Micky$oft to fuck it up or monetize it to the point where subscriptions start dropping.
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Or maybe they'll stop milking that long dead cow and actually make a sequel.
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Or maybe they'll stop milking that long dead cow and actually make a sequel.
What you're calling a dead cow still has millions of active players. Around six million per month over the last couple years. At $15/month, that's $108M/year. I'd milk that cow any day.
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Fine, obviously not a dead cow although the user base has recently taken a big hit from what I understand.
If I were a fan of the game though I strongly suspect I'd want a proper sequel rather than being stuck with an almost 20 year old game. It's not like they don't have the money to do their fans right with that.
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I mean... (Score:2)
Being bought by MS usually spells death for any creativity in a gaming company but Activision Blizzard is way ahead on that curve so... meh?
It's okay, it's NFTs not Cash. (Score:2)
They're selling them JPEGs. What could go wrong ?
Elections have consequences (Score:2)
Mac support (Score:2)
Can you concentrate (Score:2)
that much evil in one location?
Seems something will happen to the laws of physics...
Unwanted sexual advances ? (Score:2)
Out of a context "Unwanted sexual advance" is a strange expression. By the very nature of human relationships you don't know if your advances are wanted or not before trying. That's the point of advances.
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If you've been employed by any employer of significant size you've watched training videos which have already explained all that to you.
Fact Check (Score:5, Informative)
Can we please fact check this from the summary:
I've read an account that it was dubbed The Cosby Suite because of the resemblance between the room's decor and Cosby's choice in sweaters. It was dubbed this years before allegations were publicly made against Cosby, hence they couldn't have possibly attributed it to behavior Cosby was ultimately jailed for.
True, the reputation of the Blizzard exec was already cemented by then and known by his enablers in that photo. But it's still unethical journalism if they spread misinformation about the origin story.
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I think the issue was more to do with the fact that it was filled with booze and the staff used to chat about taking girls back to it. Regardless of where the name came from, its reputation and the way staff joked about it in work chat groups was the issue.
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Awesome! It's going to be very interesting ... (Score:2)
... to observe which company will eventually succeed in screwing up the other. I'd usually put all my bets on MS for f*cking things up, but with todays abomination that ActiBlizz has become, I'd say this is pretty much a tie. ActiBlizz is such a toxic sludge it has potential to disintegrate MS from the inside, that's for sure.
sexual abuse (Score:2)
I guess this is one way to clean house... let someone buy you out and then let their HR handle it. Then again, Microsoft is going through its own me-too woes so there's that...
It's certainly very interesting, though am not really surprised...
I don't hold Microsoft to a high standard (Score:2)
Never thought a game studio could be this big (Score:2)
Buy him out boys! (Score:2)
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Aside... (Score:2)
Politics aside:
This is the death of a historic company. Forget the politics.
This is what you get when an economy does not promote diversity but rather homogeneous business models. Take the one that makes the most money and roll with it. Who cares if the product is lackluster: this strategy sells.
It's an example of profitability at the expense of consumers rather than profitability through serving consumers.
Take a look at game innovation over the last 10-15 years. There is practically none. The suits at thes
It's the equivalent of Disney buying Star Wars. (Score:3)
Your long dead childhood memories will be further disgraced indefinitely. It's also kind of amusing that they're keeping Kotick who is one of the most hated douchebags in gaming - and bears at least some of if not all of the blame for their shitty reputation going in to this.
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Your long dead childhood memories will be further disgraced indefinitely. It's also kind of amusing that they're keeping Kotick who is one of the most hated douchebags in gaming - and bears at least some of if not all of the blame for their shitty reputation going in to this.
We don't know that. If Microsoft wanted a change in management, this would be the wrong time to announce it - even if this has been agreed with Kotick. The best time for such a change would be after the deal had closed.
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Your long dead childhood memories will be further disgraced indefinitely.
OMG, did something happen to Atari?
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Frankly, I think the idea is not to make Windows a cornerstone of the gaming, but to put Sony into insignificance. I don't have numbers, but if we ignore mobile and console gaming, Windows has the first place with the next 2 places empty. Linux and Apple (desktop/laptop) aren't really on the radar, and neither is Chromebook.
"I am rather afraid for what this means for the future"
I think it means more XBoxes and fewer Playstations (with the desktop/laptop market an unlucky bystander).
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No, they're a long ways from a monopoly.
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Skype was a government takeover due to them not removing encryption and peer-to-peer-calling.
Skype was asked to stop doing p2p routing of calls and force them into a central infrastructure for police monitoring. They refused, added more encryption instead.
Within a short period and likely some sealed national-security-letters, Microsoft comes out and buys them but curiously within less than a year of that purchase, already rewrote the entire stack to use centralized wiretap-friendly routing.
It was quite obvi