Where do you stand on Microsoft buying Activision/Blizzard?

[dane007]

Where did u get forza horizon 5 performed badly??. It did even better than its predecessor by a huge amount. It surpassed 10 million on lunch and it's over 20 million players now. That's huge and gamepass performed greatly. 

Halo infinite may not sell as well as halo3 or 2 but it sold more than what new games try to achieve and gamepass helped it

Kyuu said:

EpicRandy said:

"[...] it was then clear that Microsoft intends to control the future of gaming and manage huge IP's that sell super well on Playstation consoles.

Microsoft has clear intentions to monopolize the future of gaming via brute force (they will fail). When they gain complete control over some of the most popular gaming IP's and developers, they won't be so nice anymore. They're already raising prices after speaking against it for temporary PR points, and they attempted to double Live Gold's price and only stopped because Xbox isn't powerful enough to absorb the backlash. Things should and will change when they're more comfortable."

That's some slippery slope logical fallacy. Your argument is they will get bad/worst believe me on it. The thing is if MS get worst it will lose its base as it happened in past, as happened to Sony in the past. Also, this deal isn't gonna result in MS having any or close to any sort of monopoly and it ain't like they gonna try to go there anyway. It would be so stupid to create a monopoly just to see the government forced to divest the majority of it.

"A lot of people argued that GamePass won't need any price hikes anytime soon, and the "possible" loss in traditional sales from the inclusions of CoD and the likes would be offset by an increase in subscriber count. I argued that price hike is inevitable if every big Zenimax/ABK game is added day and date, or else Xbox profitability would decline (if it's not in the minus already) and MS higher ups may not be happy about it forever. MS missed their GamePass subs target for two consecutive years."

And you may both be right you argue 2 different things.

"It's one thing to argue that the benefits/potential outweigh the negatives/risks (fair take), it's another to argue it's only bad for Sony."

I was speaking about actors in the industry not consumer-wise. But even then, and except for Sony consumers in regards to content other than CoD and already announced ps5 titles, all I see is nothing else than fear-mongering and slippery slope fallacy not a fact-based unavoidable consequence of the deal.

"Starfield should be the first "real test", ignoring Halo Infinite and Forza Horizon 5 which left the charts as soon as they entered. Ragnarok sold the majority of copies on PS5... let's see how the Xbox version of Starfield fairs against the PC version. Oh wait... we can't... MS hardly shares anything! The only milestone in recent years they proudly shared is Sea of Thieves selling 5 million on Steam, without announcing Xbox numbers (where the vast majority of GamePass users are)."

Not sure I get what you mean by Starfield being a test thing but sure MS will get stats from it has with all titles, as for Sea of thieves they also announced 30 million unique players across all platforms in June this year. 

It's easier to get away with fucked up practices or at least dial back on "pro-consumer" stuff when you have a massive catalogue of popular games that people will trade their testicles for, that's just common sense. MS's game lineup upon ABK's acquisition should beat Sony and even Nintendo's in popularity (potentially even if they left Playstation) I know enough about Microsoft's other divisions, the history of Xbox, and the market to form reasonable opinions or expectations.

Sony is capable of getting away with worse practices than before, because they over the years built a really strong lineup of 1st party content that complements the excellent 3rd party support which Microsoft acquisitions are now threatening to weaken (It doesn't matter what they say they want to do... the simple fact that they're in Microsoft's control is a threat in and of itself, and may or may not manifest as soon as the contracts end. In Zenimax's case, it's already manifesting). Then you've got Nintendo which doesn't even bother price dropping their hardware or software, never mind putting their new games on a subscription service. Both Sony and Nintendo could get away with things that MS didn't have the luxury to consider, because Xbox's software was decidedly inferior that they had to fall back on value/consumer-friendliness selling points or else they're fucked. The New MS with the smaller acquisitions + Mojang + Zenimax/Bethesda + ABK isn't the same small player whose entire selling point is for-the-consumer and value. They'll have "other options" to consider, and this is the part that's making Sony panic, and the part that could lead to more unnecessary "revenge-acquisitions" and wastes of money that could have gone to cultivating and establishing countless developers and talents.

If I understood you correctly, you said Sony putting their games day 1 on PS+ is 99% more likely than MS toning down their day and date releases (or something along these lines). Starfield should be a good test to see what kind of impact being on a service day 1 does to the sales performance of a game with a great potential (I'm pretending/assuming Forza Horizon 5 and Halo Infinite never had potential). If the impact on sales is too significant (exiting most charts not long post release), Sony would be less eager to try out Microsoft's model.

Microsoft's "number of players" are padded statistics that don't mean much to Sony or Nintendo. MS has to prove that their games are "selling" gangbusters despite being on GamePass, and only then will the idea of Sony putting their games on PS+ day 1 be feasible for them. They're not going to trade traditional sales for an increase in subs (and neither will Nintendo lol).

Forza Horizon 5 and Halo Infinite both underperformed sales wise. If Starfield underperforms too, MS may consider other options, and Sony won't copy them. Just my opinion.