What a bizarre view of the world. It’s like teenagers gossiping about celebrity relationships, but with corporations instead.

A Microsoft acquisition of this company is bad, and an Apple acquisition of this company would be bad.

When mega corporations like this consolidate, consumers always lose. Microsoft couldn’t win customers through product and service quality, so they bought one of the largest game publishers in the world so that their competition can’t sell those games anymore.

Complaining about a bizarre world view and then dropping an equally bizarre and hyperbolic statement. I think this will be good, just as I think Microsoft's previous gaming acquisitions have been good.

For those who like Bethesda Games and bought into the Sony ecosystem? Good for you, maybe.

I am very sad that ES6 and Starfield will never run on a Sony console. Just like when some Gimlet podcasts I liked went Spotify exclusive -- this kind of thing is a net negative for the world.

Yes exactly - it should meet the current standard for anti-trust action that it hurts consumers. It's quite sad that this is not enforced at all anymore apparently.

personally, I'm glad they won't be wasting time catering to two lowest-common-denominator systems. as someone who's only ever owned a PC, I've always lamented my high end (or, after a few years, low-grade (but still better than console)) hardware going to waste on games which haven't figured out how to make proper use of it. we've had affordable SSDs for nearly a fricken whole decade and essentially zero attempts to optimize their use until now, now that consoles have them. and there still aren't any directstorage games out. it's ridiculous the frontiers we've lost, the games we've gimped, due to low end hardware restraints. someday i hope they ditch the idea of the "xbox" as well, and consoles are lost to the sands of time. but for now, at least they're only wasting their time optimizing for one piece of trash, and at least that trash uses the same OS.

Your complaint boils down to the equivalent of "why aren't safe speed limits on roads optimized around hypercars". Probably because the average car is close to a Toyota Camry. The number of people with high end PCs is a drop in the bucket compared to the number of console owners and publishers want to make money.

it's not just about high end PCs, though. like i said, something as basic as an SSD has been affordable for nearly a decade, for not high-end builds. but the fact the xbox one and ps4 exist, and didn't come with one by default, means nobody cared. it's a tragedy. whatever hardware level they decide that consoles get for a given generation holds back the development of gaming tech for their entire lifespan.

And you weren't aware of the potential risks of a closed ecosystem before?

It's not like you bought into an open ecosystem, but now they closed it off.

I didn't buy into either ecosystem. I'm just trying to show that it's not positive for everyone.

Never said it's positive for everyone but "consumers always lose" is equally false.

Commercial games aren't made to make everyone happy.

No game release is a "positive for everyone" and never will be.

I can equally argue that my neighbor baking bread is not positive for me, because I don't get to eat it. And I like bread...

"consumers always lose" and "it's not positive for everyone" are different statements with non-overlapping meanings.

> It’s like teenagers gossiping about celebrity relationships, but with corporations instead.

I think that’s accurate. Whether there’s room for and value in these kinds of playful conjectures is of course up to each of us to decide.

It's totally accurate bc humans are a simple ape that should be living in bands of 50 to 150, but then we had several technological revolutions. Someday well be more like star trek vulcans, I'm sure.

I'm not sure this is bad because Blizzard has been a total mess for quite some time. I'm excited to see if it can get better.

Consumers loose literally nothing from Microsoft's acquisition of Activision/Blizzard.

The tinted rose glasses are really strong. Most large company merges are close to never good for the end user - less concurrency and competition is not good.

Would've been valid only if the quality of products and services pre-acquisition were actually good, and for Blizzard games at least it's been anything but good in the past few years. Gaming is a very end-user-focused experience and until their testimonies come in due time, your abstract market competition spiel is irrelevant to it.

IP laws already prohibit competition.

There is only one maker of Diablo, and no Torchlight is going to replace Diablo.

Games aren't going to get pulled from other platforms. New games may not come out on (insert-your-preffered-console), but they never were guaranteed to come out at all.

Thus consumers aren't loosing anything here. It doesn't even reduce competition.

Yes consumers are losing here. In the near future, you will have to own at least two almost identical gaming devices to play all the relevant AAA games. That's basically a $500 tax being applied to gaming enthusiasts to get the same access to IP.

So what you're saying is that consumers aren't loosing access to games at all. They aren't forced to choose one to the exclusion of the other. Other consoles aren't forced out of the market. And other console manufacturer will have a market incentive to invest into similar games, to entice people from buying a second console...

And the market that would actually care, will already own multiple consoles... and a gaming rig.

You've actually managed to convince me that this is good for the market, not neutral.

I can't tell if you're joking, but I hope you are. Having to pay more to access the same products is not a net loss to the consumer?

You're stretching the term "same" to mean "new products created for a different use case". (5G is a net loss to a consumer, because you need to buy a new phone to access "same" product.) Same products are quite clearly not same here.

Consumer doesn't mean "a specific individual that owns a PS5", it's a generic term meaning market participants that consume products. Consumers don't loose if prices for new products are substantially higher in a competitive market, because willingness for a consumer to pay the price in a competitive market equals to the value of the product.

Interactive game market is highly competitive. Therefore producer prices a product at $500 => consumer agrees that $500 is acceptable => consumer spends $500 => consumer gets $500 in value => cost - value = 0 => no consumer net loss.

You're essentially making the argument that games are fungible while the other commenter is saying that they are not. The reality is that most games, yes including triple A games, are hot garbage and make no money and provide no benefit to everyone. It's a lot like the movie industry in that sense. So consoling myself that maybe someone will make a copy of the cool game I want to play doesn't really work, because that copy is near guaranteed to be expensive garbage

>It’s like teenagers gossiping about celebrity relationships, but with corporations instead.

very much need, but that's how gaming industry works in general - hype, fans and all.

This is the world we live in now. People rage against capitalism but at the same they'll hang their hat on corporation x and defend them to the death.

I don’t think these are the same people.

> Microsoft couldn’t win customers through product and service quality

GamePass subscriber numbers are growing at an incredible clip.

This sounds a bit like "ms should just make better games". Games are hard. Extremely hard. If Microsoft managed to incorporate the Battle net portfolio into their gamepass, there is some argument to be made about how much better that service would become.

I see your point, I really do, this stinks in all sorts of ways, but there could be a benefit here for a lot of players.

>This sounds a bit like "ms should just make better games". Games are hard. Extremely hard.

The answer to this conundrum for them should be, "Tough titties, learn to compete or die, but we will not allow you to bully your way into a market with money."

I sometimes really question if I'm back on reddit while reading some of these replies...

You're in HN, talking about MS and acquisitions, telling them to learn to compete?

Am I on the right website or has my browser been hijacked?

Buying Blizzivision is not the same as competing, it's them swinging their money dick around to take stuff away from the competition.

Not sure if an image campaign is enough to convince me that they have changed. They had to embrace open source to some degree because developers were plainly fleeing their environments en masse. Today it is extremely hard to find an expert for hard technical problems. Perhaps everyone is hiding somewhere, but I haven't found them yet.

Apple doesn't have a gaming division. Why would they be interested in acquiring Blizzard?

That’s why i included the paranthesis “(or probably could have) happen(ed)”.

That said, they do have a gaming service: https://www.apple.com/apple-arcade/

Apple Arcade is for casual games that have to work on all of Apple's form factors (minus the watch, thankfully). I've tried it out twice. It is, with very few exceptions, in a completely different category from PC gaming because most people access it through a touchscreen. It's like comparing a PS5 and a Switch, except that Apple Arcade is not nearly as polished as the Switch.

My impression is also that Apple Arcade is already pushing the limits of how much Apple's management wants to touch gaming.

Apple has started to sink hundreds of millions into Apple Arcade the past couple years.

Big AAA titles take several years to produce and I doubt Apple will allow half-baked games to launch. That means we won't be seeing those games start to launch until 2023-2024.

Apple is definitely working on a VR headset. They've bought out 4-5 VR companies already. There were rumors of a 2022 launch, but 2023 matches up much better with their game studio launch dates.

That subscription is a HUGE moneymaker (that's how WoW made Blizzard so much money). Most serious gamers play 1-2 games for a couple of years. Traditional studios charge $60 (less for sales) and then release one $20-30 DLC per year. That gives them $120 over two years at the very best (though most players won't bother with DLC). Apple gets $80 per year unconditionally. Moreover, this will get casual gamers in addition to hardcore ones.

Now that Apple runs everything on M1 and even the slowest M1 chips have better GPUs than most Wintel systems, Apple can sell games to everyone. Because everything is using the same architecture (same CPU and same GPU across the board), their devs save a ton of time and money developing and optimizing which means their total time to deliver and cost to deliver is much lower.

I suspect that MS sees this as an extremely serious threat. They need to do everything they can to leverage xbox pass and compete.

No matter how much money you throw at the current Apple Arcade, most people will play the game on a 5" touch screen. If you want to target living room gamers with a gamepad, the same game has to work on an Apple TV that struggles to render 3D scenes at 4K (probably until an M2 version comes out?). I think it's just going to be a baseline of games for people/families who have Apple One, like how Solitaire and Minesweeper came with Windows.

If Apple goes all-in on VR, the whole VR market will benefit from greater public acceptance. But at the very best I predict it'll be like the Nintendo Wii: a few games that are extremely popular, and then it gets old.

Which is a shame because I agree that Apple is in a great position to enter the gaming market. Imagine what Nintendo could do with powerful hardware in so many hands! But by the same logic, Apple should have crushed Spotify long ago, given its mile-wide lead with the iTunes Store, and yet the nicest thing I have heard about Apple Music is that it works with other Apple stuff. I honestly don't think Apple's management understands entertainment.

You don't have to render identically. A 720p phone and a 4k TV are quite different.

An average steam gamer has a 3-5 TFLOP 1060 rendering 1080p with a quad-core intel at 2.5GHz. A 6-core A15 (little cores are about as fast per clock as Zen 1) with a 1.3-1.5 TFLOP GPU comes quite close. If Apple wanted, they could add a magnetic dock with controls and extra battery for serious gamers too.

For something like the Apple TV (A12 isn't a slouch though no 4K gaming machine) they could offer streaming with remote rendering.

I suspect the launch 4+4 CPU with 32 or even 64-core GPU. They should sell that in a mac mini sized console with a wireless VR headset. That said, Oculus Quest 2 is quite popular and it has a Qualcomm 865 which is much slower than that A12 let alone the A15. They could definitely stomp the Ques 2 with an A15-based device and could go much farther with a M1/M2 chip.

> You don't have to render identically. A 720p phone and a 4k TV are quite different.

Yes, but that's kind of the problem. The 720p phone has a lot of horsepower per pixel, but is crippled by touch controls. The Apple TV is _slower_ on a larger screen, with yet another frustrating input situation because Apple didn't put a gamepad in the package. (They don't even make gamepads! The MFi ones I bought were pure junk.) I can't imagine a more hostile environment to develop AAA games for.

A year back or so there were articles claiming that apple has stopped all development of content rich games, aiming at quick addictive ones instead. They released studios making the former from contracts.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-30/apple-can...

You would be shocked to know Apple was days late to buying Bungie, creator of Halo.

They was a way different time and a different Apple.

Exactly. MS has Xbox and has been buying up a lot of Game studios as well. Blizzard makes sense for them to buy; Apple doesn’t seem to be contending…

To start a gaming division with widely known titles already onboard.

What else are people going to do with their $3,000 Apple Goggles?

The rampant sexual harrasment is more in line with Microsoft's alleged culture.

The Apple of gaming is Rockstar Games.

The Apple of gaming is Valve/Steam. They make hardware and run a leading app distribution service while overall operating as a pricier minority of the industry.

They have any hardware that took off?

The index. The have a few other pieces of hardware they have made over the years. Currently they are making the Steam Deck, time will tell how that does.

I have an index. I like it. It definitely hasn’t taken off.

It's not the Index fault, just modern VR tech hasn't taken off. The Index is a great piece of hardware. And my prediction is that the Steam Deck will sell like hotcakes.

I think modern VR sucks. Beat Saber is cool but frankly beat saber would be just as cool on the wii or the kinect or on a normal screen with vr wands. It doesn’t actually utilize VR when you think about it.

Half Life Alyx was impressive but it also kind of sucked. Teleport movement breaks immersion hard. And the enemy design was clearly incredibly gentle to accommodate the fact that people are not in fact very competent in VR.

Natural moving (rather than frequent warp) is what I want to be solved on VR games.

It's a chicken and egg problem. VR tech isn't taking off cause there isn't enough market share to justify having great games for it.

To get that level of market share a company basically needs to subsidize the initial hardware/consoles. I don't think Valve has ever learned that concept and as such they are still selling the hardware at full price. This in contrast to say FB/Microsoft/Sony who actively subsidize their offerings because they understand the benefit of getting people locked in their ecosystem.

I predict a repeat of Steam Machines. (as a Linux user)

I'm pretty sure idealogically valve are opposed to locking people into their ecosystem. They don't even make it so you can only play their own games with steam, and they allow you to add non-steam games to your library. They're a weird comapny in general, they have a pretty hardcore horizontal management system going on in their company which as I understand as an outsider is a big reason why they've struggled to bring stuff to market of late.

Their (leaked) employee handbook is literally subtitled "A fearless adventure in knowing what to do when no one’s there telling you what to do"

>They don't even make it so you can only play their own games with steam

? You can't play DOTA2 or CS:GO or any of their real moneymakers anywhere but Steam.

I mean that even if steam closed tomorrow, you would be able to play all your games. They're literally just installed in a folder on your computer and steam clicks the exe for you. They also released server code for most of their own games so you can run your own. Most companies would have gated access to their servers so you could only run the game when you could connect to their database

> Steam Deck will sell like hotcakes

Pretty sure it won’t. Too chunky for playing indie games on the go, not enough battery to play AAA. And if you plan having it plugged in as a desktop replacement, there’re batter gaming laptops.

I cant believe the Apple of Gaming discussion with no mention of Nintendo.

Nintendo actually delivers quality products, just too intelligent for American audiences. USA just wants guns, action, press A/Pay to win!

Ever heard of EA?