Every single time I have played an Annapurna published game, I had a fantastic time. I won’t say that everything they did was equal, but everything they did was entertaining, and thought-provoking.
I can’t quite follow the legalese required to parse EXACTLY what this means going forward, but I am sure it is not good, and that is disappointing.
All the money that’s supposed to be spent fighting pedophiles are actually spent on SLAPP suits against youtubers exposing the pedophile developers on their payroll
Jill Braff, head of ZeniMax studios, said in the town hall that she hoped the reorganization would allow the division, which also develops Fallout and Doom, to put more focus on fewer projects. “It’s hard to support nine studios all across the world with a lean central team with an ever-growing plate of things to do,”
Why gobble up so many studios to consolidate into a gaming megacorp, then get gobbled up yourself by Microsoft? What’s the purpose of acquiring so many studios and holding onto so much IP if you can’t handle them?
That was my take too. “We’re spread too thin”… Then why the fuck did you buy up all these companies? Sure sounds like they just gobbled up all the good IP to hoard like a dragon on its pile of gold. Or to make sure those IPs don’t make it to Sony exclusives, wish the FTC would hang them by the balls since they’ve basically done opposite of what they promised during the mergers.
Because CEOs are fucking idiots. So many companies do this shit, it’s not just the gaming side. A company starts to grow and instead of keeping with an organic growth they buy companies over and over.
That’s straight up the behavior of a company that wants to create a monopoly. Buy up the smaller companies so the competitors can’t buy them up and then just shut those companies down so their products can’t compete with the existing money makers. The money they put into those studios for game development is just a charade to please the authorities. Cause if they would shut those companies down immediately after purchasing that would be undeniably anti-competitive behavior and illegal even in the US.
Which is exactly what I expected them to do. I laughed at Blizzard fans being hopeful about the acquisition because things didn’t go well at the time. It was always just another step towards closure.
Blizzard fans have a habit of believing Blizzard is still this small indie company with humble games like Starcraft, Lost Vikings, and Diablo, and that it’s just mean ol Activision making them do things like…
sigh
Have two to three whole expansions of Sylvanas Windrunner being not only the Warchief of the Horde, but for all intents and purposes being basically the main fucking character, complete with a writer who brought her previously killed off-boyfriend Nathanos, only as a self-insert.
Like I love Sylvanas, she was my favorite character, but Jesus fucking Christ that was cringe. Not only was it completely out of character for the Horde to give her leadership (Protip: The Forsaken aren’t trusted by anyone because they’re scary fucking zombies who do scary zombie shit, the Horde just figures they’re less dangerous as allies than enemies), but she continously forced the Horde to do horrible shit.
Now if the point was that Sylvanas was evil and the Horde’s mistrust of her was valid, I guess that’d work, but the way it was executed was more like “Look how cool Sylvanas is for doing all this edgy shit.”
I don’t know who the Warchief is now, I honestly don’t think they have any fucking Horde characters left to be Warchief given how often Horde leaders get killed off. Jesus Christ WoW’s story just completely shit itself after Legion.
I got off-topic, my point was Microsoft was never going to save Blizzard from Activision, because Activision isn’t holding Blizzard at gunpoint and forcing them to kill off Heroes Of The Storm, Steal female employees’ breast milk, or making Overwatch 2, Blizzard’s just not a cool company.
I think the data shows that advertisement is super effective, not that people prefer to be advertised. If people preferred advertising over a better product then games like Balatro, Vampire Survivors etc. literally couldn’t be successful, because those games had effectively zero marketing budget. Their success came from word-of-mouth because the game itself was great.
Lots of obvious astroturfing going on regarding this. I’ve seen this news everywhere from Slashdot to Reddit with people sucking Microsofts dick. It’s either that, or people are too young to remember the bullshit Microsoft pulled … since forever basically. People aren’t going to benefit from this merger. Microsoft is patient. Embrace, extend, extinguish is their strategy. 10 year agreements are nothing for them to wait out.
And it’s the same with every merger – “This will bring more competition, blah blah blah”, then merger goes through and half the people are fired, half the rest are rolled into existing systems, and some empty shell of the previous company just wanders along with no real spirit any longer.
I’m not happy with the state of consolidation in every market under the sun, but I’m sure as shit happy Bobby Kotick is finally going to fuck off and I’m happy I’ll be able to play activision games on gamepass. When gamepass inevitably enshitifies I’ll just get rid of my subscription.
Yeah I can see that. Nadella brought new energy and almost made MSFT look cool, but years later we can see how MSFT is basically gobbling up everything in every domain.
Update: Why am I being downvoted? Did you all forget that MSFT has acquired LinkedIn, GitHub, Mojang, Bethesda, ABK and 49% stake in OpenAI all under Satya? Each one of those are massive acquisitions.
Microsoft are far, far, far from being close to the leader in the market even with ABK on their books, so your FUD makes no sense. Pretty much no one in the entire industry is against the acquisition apart from their main competitor, Sony, who are the market leader and abuse that position every day of the year to pull content away from Microsoft.
ABK will operate like they do currently, just like Bethesda do, only now they have Microsoft money and backing.
The only people that this deal is bad for are people who only play on PlayStation consoles. Everyone else benefits.
You said nothing will change. They will be part of the microcrap veil and will follow their ways of doing things. Like not hire people and only contract for 18 months then get in new contractors to pick up where the recently fired left off… Like what happened at 343i.
At this point anyone selling a company to a bigger studio is just either ignorant or greedy. It’s almost a given that they’ll just crash it into the grounds. Acquisitions and mergers might be like the eighth deadly sin. Everyone loses.
Who cares? It’s the audiences fault for assuming that prior performance is an indicator of future performance. Let the founders cash out. Buyers get rich because audiences think quality will be maintained post acquisition. How often does that really happen though?
Yeah I mean, I have a hard time being too sympathetic to people who unnecessarily sold their company. There is no reason to do it. If you need money, you can always get investors to get a minor stake or something.
According to the article the old leadership wanted to share the bonus with the whole development team of around 100 people. I don’t think the motivation of the team will be great now that the publisher pushed the bonus in unreachable distance. Fucking assholes can’t even stand by their own promises.
According to the wiki page… “In May 2024, Take-Two announced it would shut down Intercept Games but continue to update Kerbal Space Program 2 under the Private Division label.”
I wonder how will they manage that logistically. They are firing every single developer from IG. Who exactly in Private Division is going to be doing the updating? I suspect they will just brush a little of the code that is ready, then completely abandon the product in a year or so.
Warner bros has no idea how to media anymore. They forgot about looney tunes characters. They cancel their movies after shooting before release. They do t make dlc for games that sold like hotcakes. All they did was patent the nemesis system. what the fuck are they doing?
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