# Microsoft squiring Activision/Blizzard



## Cmaier

Microsoft acquiring Activision Blizzard in $68.7B gaming deal | AppleInsider
					

Software giant Microsoft has agreed to purchase Activision Blizzard, a major acquisition valued at $68.7 billion that combines many major studios under one entity.




					appleinsider.com
				




That’s a lot of money.  Wonder if there are antitrust issues here.


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## Eric

Cmaier said:


> Microsoft acquiring Activision Blizzard in $68.7B gaming deal | AppleInsider
> 
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> Software giant Microsoft has agreed to purchase Activision Blizzard, a major acquisition valued at $68.7 billion that combines many major studios under one entity.
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> appleinsider.com
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> That’s a lot of money.  Wonder if there are antitrust issues here.



Wow that's a huge acquisition, looks like MS is buying out the competition in the same way FB did with social networks.


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## dukebound85

Cmaier said:


> Microsoft acquiring Activision Blizzard in $68.7B gaming deal | AppleInsider
> 
> 
> Software giant Microsoft has agreed to purchase Activision Blizzard, a major acquisition valued at $68.7 billion that combines many major studios under one entity.
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> appleinsider.com
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> That’s a lot of money.  Wonder if there are antitrust issues here.






> Once completed, the acquisition will turn Microsoft into the world's third-largest gaming company by revenue, behind Tencent and Sony.[/quote}
> 
> I wouldn't think so with the above being the case


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## Cmaier

The antitrust question would be, essentially, whether it reduces competition and raises prices in some defined market, and not whether or not there are still bigger competitors.  I expect there will be some scrutiny, but what happens is anybody’s guess.


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## SuperMatt

They decided they are big fans of the Activision corporate culture? Microsoft really needs more toxic masculinity I guess.


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## DT

I'm sure there's also some concern, re:  does this mean X/Y/Z game will become an MS platform (Windows/XBOX) exclusive?

I mean, certainly that's a balance between losing a whole platform worth of buyers (Playstation) vs. gaining new buyers for an MS platform.  I'm sure MS would love to funnel people into their ecosystem, and simply development by using their tech stack.


Next up:  MS buys Nintendo.


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## Eric

DT said:


> Next up:  MS buys Nintendo.



Dude! No.


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## Ulenspiegel

Or they simply like to play World of Warcraft...

Or the kid of some MS owner has been hunting for some rare drops w/o success.

Problem solved. Post-Christmas present...

P.S.: Good timing from Blizzard, btw... they are having some serious issues, losing subscribers.


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## Nycturne

Eric said:


> Wow that's a huge acquisition, looks like MS is buying out the competition in the same way FB did with social networks.




Maybe the term competition is used loosely here, but this is a bit murkier than simply buying a competitor, since this is a vertical integration move. 

It will deny Sony’s platform access to the catalog down the road though, much like the Bethesda purchase, which will limit competition that way. That’s really the push for this, IMO. Microsoft has had limited success trying to be a neutral platform with limited first party development support, and I suspect they are looking to create a stronger environment for exclusive titles on their side of the fence.



SuperMatt said:


> They decided they are big fans of the Activision corporate culture? Microsoft really needs more toxic masculinity I guess.




This is definitely the thing that confuses me. The culture at Microsoft has been pushing away from the Gates/Ballmer culture for years now (with limited success admittedly). But I have little to no visibility into this part of the company, and the company is large enough that each organization can have its own culture and identity to some extent.

I half wonder if this is a case where they feel like the culture is something that can be “fixed” once Kotick and the like are swept out of the way.


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## Andropov

I don't like how most big game studios are now under control of either Sony of Microsoft :/


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## Nycturne

I’m kinda surprised it’s taking this long to devolve into a full fledged duopoly.


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## Chew Toy McCoy

I look forward to playing World of Monopolycraft.

Here's how antitrust laws work in the US now.  If you own all the farmland in the US (Bill Gates actually does own the most) as long as there's some guy standing on a corner selling oranges from the tree in his backyard then you don't have a monopoly and aren't considered unfair to competition.  That's mostly an analogy but also true. 

We could probably save some tax dollars by removing the symbolic middle men that are politicians and just officially say CEOs are in charge of everything.


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## Andropov

Nycturne said:


> I’m kinda surprised it’s taking this long to devolve into a full fledged duopoly.



There'll always be indie devs to avoid a complete duopoly but yeah, AAA games will soon be a duopoly (with maybe one big independent studio like Rockstar) and medium size games will disappear.


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## Nycturne

Andropov said:


> There'll always be indie devs to avoid a complete duopoly but yeah, AAA games will soon be a duopoly (with maybe one big independent studio like Rockstar) and medium size games will disappear.




It’s not like the indie devs can escape the effects of either MS/Sony or Apple/Google though if they want access to consoles or mobile devices respectively (which form a majority of the addressable market for video games). And it’s that control that defines a duopoly, not the absence of smaller players. It’s ironic that the Mac/PC is still the easiest place for small devs right now to not have to deal with publishing rules/etc if they don’t want to.



Chew Toy McCoy said:


> I look forward to playing World of Monopolycraft.
> 
> Here's how antitrust laws work in the US now.  If you own all the farmland in the US (Bill Gates actually does own the most) as long as there's some guy standing on a corner selling oranges from the tree in his backyard then you don't have a monopoly and aren't considered unfair to competition.  That's mostly an analogy but also true.




Part of it is that US courts have interpreted the law not so much that monopolies themselves are illegal, but rather certain conduct is. While US anti-trust law is considered some of the strongest in the world, it also still leaves a lot of wiggle room for anti-competitive behaviors, and weird gotchas where further consolidation is potentially less evil (i.e. sustaining and strengthening an oligarchy in AT&T/Verizon/T-Mobile with the aim of preventing a duopoly of AT&T/Verizon).

I do wish there were stronger protections in place to block excessive consolidation that leads to anti-competitive oligarchies, or remedies against such oligarchies in general.


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## Colstan

It looks like Microsoft is going to have a governmental speed bump along their way to gaming dominance.









						Feds likely to challenge Microsoft’s $69 billion Activision takeover
					

A lawsuit would be the FTC’s biggest merger challenge to date under Chair Lina Khan.




					www.politico.com
				




This is the wrong climate for big mergers in the tech industry. Apple has typically kept their projects in-house, so it's no surprise that they haven't moved to acquire a company like Electronic Arts, as was rumored, but this is even more incentive to not bother. We've already seen a somewhat similar thing play out with Nvidia.


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## diamond.g

Colstan said:


> It looks like Microsoft is going to have a governmental speed bump along their way to gaming dominance.
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> Feds likely to challenge Microsoft’s $69 billion Activision takeover
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> A lawsuit would be the FTC’s biggest merger challenge to date under Chair Lina Khan.
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> www.politico.com
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> This is the wrong climate for big mergers in the tech industry. Apple has typically kept their projects in-house, so it's no surprise that they haven't moved to acquire a company like Electronic Arts, as was rumored, but this is even more incentive to not bother. We've already seen a somewhat similar thing play out with Nvidia.



This is probably happening because Sony is pitching a fit over Call of Duty.


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## Renzatic

SuperMatt said:


> They decided they are big fans of the Activision corporate culture? Microsoft really needs more toxic masculinity I guess.




Windows 12: Fuck You Beta Edition.


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## diamond.g

Renzatic said:


> Windows 12: Fuck You Beta Edition.



MS is doing for GamePass what Apple should be doing for Apple Arcade.


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## Renzatic

diamond.g said:


> MS is doing for GamePass what Apple should be doing for Apple Arcade.




Other than being able to stream games, they're doing roughly the same thing, aren't they? You pay so much a month to download as many games as you want?


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## diamond.g

Renzatic said:


> Other than being able to stream games, they're doing roughly the same thing, aren't they? You pay so much a month to download as many games as you want?



They are buying games to make the service worthwhile. If they get Activision/Blizzard those games will end up on GP as well (so no need to buy CoD every year). If Apple were to do the same Resident Evil 8 should have been on Apple Arcade (same with the games made by Feral Interactive and the upcoming No Mans Sky).


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## thekev

The last good game Activision ever made was Earthworm Jim, and I'm not sure I would pay many billions for that.


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## Renzatic

thekev said:


> The last good game Activision ever made was Earthworm Jim, and I'm not sure I would pay many billions for that.




WRONG! Tony Hawk Pro Skater.


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## Yoused

Renzatic said:


> Windows 12: Fuck You Beta Edition.




*Windows Login Denied due to Insufficient Kill Count*​


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## rdrr

> *West of House*
> You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
> There is a small mailbox here
> 
> > open the mailbox




Microsoft's purchase of Activision completes it quest to own Zork for over 40 years.   So, Zork was the last good game that Activision owned, followed by Leisure Suit Larry, and then Pitfall.









						Four decades later, Microsoft finally owns 'Zork'
					

Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard completes a circle that opened in 1979.




					www.inverse.com


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## Renzatic

rdrr said:


> Microsoft's purchase of Activision completes it quest to own Zork for over 40 years.   So, Zork was the last good game that Activision owned, followed by Leisure Suit Larry, and then Pitfall.
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> Four decades later, Microsoft finally owns 'Zork'
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> Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard completes a circle that opened in 1979.
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> www.inverse.com




How does Leisure Suit Larry fit into this? Did Activision buy Sierra?


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## Nycturne

Renzatic said:


> How does Leisure Suit Larry fit into this? Did Activision buy Sierra?




Yes, in a round-about way:



> After seventeen years as an independent company, Sierra was acquired by CUC International in February 1996 to become part of CUC Software. However, CUC International was caught in an accounting scandal in 1998, and many of the original founders of Sierra including the Williamses left the company. Sierra remained as part of CUC Software as it was sold and renamed several times over the next few years; Sierra was formally disestablished as a company and reformed as a division of this group in August 2004. The former CUC Software group was acquired by Vivendi and branded as Vivendi Games in 2006. The Sierra division continued to operate through Vivendi Games' merger with Activision to form Activision Blizzard on July 10, 2008, but was shut down later that year. The Sierra brand was revived by Activision in 2014 to re-release former Sierra games and some independently developed games.









						Sierra Entertainment - Wikipedia
					






					en.wikipedia.org


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## lizkat

rdrr said:


> Microsoft's purchase of Activision completes it quest to own Zork for over 40 years.   So, Zork was the last good game that Activision owned, followed by Leisure Suit Larry, and then Pitfall.
> 
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> 
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> Four decades later, Microsoft finally owns 'Zork'
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> Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard completes a circle that opened in 1979.
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> www.inverse.com




 I laughed out loud reading that piece when I got to this part:



> “When _Adventure_ arrived at MIT, the reaction was typical: after everybody spent a lot of time doing nothing but solving the game,” wrote Tim Anderson and Stu Galley in their treatise “The History of Zork.” (And a pithy comment: “It’s estimated that _Adventure_ set the entire computer industry back two weeks.”)




Two weeks? I was in a consulting group working on a project down at a bank and we did nothing but trade tips on Zork for at least a month.

The project itself was tedious as hell,  since the end users were uncooperative due to all being afraid that computerization of their workflow would mean they'd lose their jobs.  We on the other hand were all afraid that Zork would cost us ours.


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## rdrr

lizkat said:


> I laughed out loud reading that piece when I got to this part:
> 
> 
> 
> Two weeks? I was in a consulting group working on a project down at a bank and we did nothing but trade tips on Zork for at least a month.
> 
> The project itself was tedious as hell,  since the end users were uncooperative due to all being afraid that computerization of their workflow would mean they'd lose their jobs.  We on the other hand were all afraid that Zork would cost us ours.



Funny thing is that Zork and Compute! magazine with their Basic programs and snippets to type into your Atari 400/800 is what got me thinking I wanted to work with computers when I got older.   Now I am seeing the finish line in my career in IT, and I got to say it _****WAS** _a good field to be in, not so much now a days.   That grievance is for another thread...  maybe.


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## lizkat

rdrr said:


> Funny thing is that Zork and Compute! magazine with their Basic programs and snippets to type into your Atari 400/800 is what got me thinking I wanted to work with computers when I got older.   Now I am seeing the finish line in my career in IT, and I got to say it _**WAS** _a good field to be in, not so much now a days.   That grievance is for another thread...  maybe.




I actually leapfrogged from "executive assistant" to "computer programmer" to  systems analyst and on up through both biz and tech ladders in infotech as the industry developed,  but there were no computer science majors when I'd been in college.  If you were lucky later on, like in the early 1970s, your company wanted to dislodge a raft of then pretty pricey consultants for some in-house workers (funny how times change on that score, eh?)  and so shipped you off to software vendors' classes, all expenses paid...

But my original launch point was from skipping a coffee break and instead looking over some consultant's shoulder one afternoon,  as she sat at a teletype machine in the offices of what passed for a hedge fund (back in the slow-go trading of that era).  She was typing in code corrections to a set of portfolio management modules we ran online with a time sharing arrangement, then recompiling and running some tests.

Well I knew a little Fortran from having worked at an actuarial firm,  and this consultant had just put in a fix to one of those modules, but she was next fixing up code for some reports that were done in COBOL.

That stuff sure God looked like plain ol' English to me, with a spattering of simple enough logic. 

I watched what she was putting in to correct her prior interpretation of our specs for those reports,  and a lightbulb went on in my head:

_*Sh^t, I could do that...  *_​
Yeah, and for 3x the pay, too:  I was on my way to an infotech consulting firm not long after.

Without that little bit of curiosity during a coffee break, on an otherwise slow day of ordering Treasuries to soak up whatever cash had settled into our clients' portfolios overnight,  I'd probably never have discovered the joys of Zork.   There was no other game short of Crystal Quest (later, on a Mac) that ever sucked me in to point of ending up late to work or thinking I might get canned for playing on the job.


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## Yoused

lizkat said:


> some reports that were done in COBOL




Will you please be careful with the profanity?


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## rdrr

lizkat said:


> I actually leapfrogged from "executive assistant" to "computer programmer" to  systems analyst and on up through both biz and tech ladders in infotech as the industry developed,  but there were no computer science majors when I'd been in college.  If you were lucky later on, like in the early 1970s, your company wanted to dislodge a raft of then pretty pricey consultants for some in-house workers (funny how times change on that score, eh?)  and so shipped you off to software vendors' classes, all expenses paid...
> 
> But my original launch point was from skipping a coffee break and instead looking over some consultant's shoulder one afternoon,  as she sat at a teletype machine in the offices of what passed for a hedge fund (back in the slow-go trading of that era).  She was typing in code corrections to a set of portfolio management modules we ran online with a time sharing arrangement, then recompiling and running some tests.
> 
> Well I knew a little Fortran from having worked at an actuarial firm,  and this consultant had just put in a fix to one of those modules, but she was next fixing up code for some reports that were done in COBOL.
> 
> That stuff sure God looked like plain ol' English to me, with a spattering of simple enough logic.
> 
> I watched what she was putting in to correct her prior interpretation of our specs for those reports,  and a lightbulb went on in my head:
> 
> _*Sh^t, I could do that...  *_​
> Yeah, and for 3x the pay, too:  I was on my way to an infotech consulting firm not long after.
> 
> Without that little bit of curiosity during a coffee break, on an otherwise slow day of ordering Treasuries to soak up whatever cash had settled into our clients' portfolios overnight,  I'd probably never have discovered the joys of Zork.   There was no other game short of Crystal Quest (later, on a Mac) that ever sucked me in to point of ending up late to work or thinking I might get canned for playing on the job.



I envy the folks that can write code.  I can read and troubleshoot a lot of what is out there, but I couldn't write myself out of a paper bag.  For some reason I understood hardware and server OS much better, and that is where I spent my better part of my career.   Now I go to meetings where everyone just views me as a dinosaur, because everything runs in the cloud.   I lost the will to politely remind them that the cloud is full of hardware, not to mention the roads getting to them.   Instead I look at picture of cats on my phone. j/k


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## lizkat

Yoused said:


> Will you please be careful with the profanity?




RPG u !!


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## Nycturne

lizkat said:


> There was no other game short of Crystal Quest (later, on a Mac) that ever sucked me in to point of ending up late to work or thinking I might get canned for playing on the job.








I had to go back and look it up, and wow, there's a version on Steam now. There goes my evening.



Yoused said:


> Will you please be careful with the profanity?




Where's the facepalm reaction emoji?

Random aside: one of my earliest real jobs was a contract job to translate some ALGOL to an app that would run on Windows. A simple internal tool used by a local company. The system it originally ran on used 48-bit words, and so I translated the code pretty literally when I _probably _didn't need to, building some utility methods to allow for data structures made up of 48-bit integers. But it was the first full "app" I wrote as a teen.


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## lizkat

Nycturne said:


> I had to go back and look it up, and wow, there's a version on Steam now. There goes my evening.




I think I might be too old for Crystal Quest by now!   I'm more into slow-go games like Pocket Frogs, which comes in handy while waiting on the phone to talk to a human being in a customer support center.


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## Nycturne

lizkat said:


> I think I might be too old for Crystal Quest by now!   I'm more into slow-go games like Pocket Frogs, which comes in handy while waiting on the phone to talk to a human being in a customer support center.




Apparently the new version is still 32-bit, so I guess I won't be playing it again soon.


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## Cmaier

FTC suing to block the acquisition.










						F.T.C. Sues to Block Microsoft’s $69 Billion Acquisition of Activision
					

The move by the commission signals an aggressive stance by federal regulators to thwart the expansion of the tech industry’s biggest companies.




					www.nytimes.com


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## lizkat

Cmaier said:


> FTC suing to block the acquisition.




Could feel just a bit late to the plate after years and years of yawning through buy-ups and shutdowns...


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## Nycturne

lizkat said:


> Could feel just a bit late to the plate after years and years of yawning through buy-ups and shutdowns...



True. But I think the heat is on more now that we're seeing the final stages of a duopoly here. All the third parties have been consolidating, and now the two biggest platform owners are buying up the consolidated third parties.


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## lizkat

Nycturne said:


> True. But I think the heat is on more now that we're seeing the final stages of a duopoly here. All the third parties have been consolidating, and now the two biggest platform owners are buying up the consolidated third parties.




Yah...   the stage right before the stage after which one lame dog sez if ya can walk here,  I'll bite ya.


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