Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard King for $69 Billion on 2023-10-13

MrSpiggott said:
$69 billion seems an awful lot to spend on something that has no real material value, somewhat like the worth given to bit coin. They've paid an extraordinary amount of money for some very successful franchise names, but have no real way of guaranteeing their future success, that's down to a few key developers, who are free to leave at any time; maybe forming another studio and creating a better product. A few bad games, a few missteps and the value of the studio could plummet.
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I would assume the development teams and tools have some material value. IW Engine is cutting edge, cross platform and fast with a proven tool chain that at least 3 teams are well versed in. Also, does Activision or Blizzard not own some real estate? I can't imagine a company that size doesn't own one of it's many campus.

Every acquisition is a risk, but this one seams less risky because of the amount of IP, tech and talent involved. And all 3 of those are proven successful.
 
SmooTh said:
They left long before the talks with Microsoft even started.
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Indeed. They are composed of employees from all sorts of different studios -- Ubisoft, Sierra, Sega, LucasArts, Vivendi Games, Seven Studios, Cryo, Blue Silver Studios, and Activision.
 
MrSpiggott said:
They've paid an extraordinary amount of money for some very successful franchise names, but have no real way of guaranteeing their future success, that's down to a few key developers, who are free to leave at any time; maybe forming another studio and creating a better product.
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This move has a lot of implications even outside the game dev itself.
 
eastmen said:
Windows Mixed reality is as good as any of the platforms. The downfall is they farmed out the building to oems and because of that headsets had varying levels of tech and build quality. HP makes great windows mixed reality headsets. MS also has some amazing vr and ar tech internally that I haven't seen else where. If Microsoft wanted to release a headset for the xbox series x they could do so easily. They have the tecnology , the only thing that may lack is controllers but even there the xbox team can do some great thing . The kinect azure tech is some of the best machine vision techology out there.
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Oh, I see. It just feels like this API never took off properly.
 
PSman1700 said:
Ive been wondering why Sony doubles down on VR so much, it seems a really hard market to expand upon. At the same time its good that someone is considering it for serious gaming atleast. Right now we only have HL Alyx thats a worthy VR game. If Sony can inspire others for more of that kind of games its nice. As said, someone has to start with it.
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It's a differentior as a competitor. I used to what their Aibo when I was younger. I'm not paying 3 grand for a robot dog though, lol.

With the amount of studios that they have, they could throw an honest attempt at VR but I say this even owning both PSVR1, a Quest 2 and intending on getting PSVR2 day one, console attempts are going to be varying degrees niche if they have the need to be tethered to the console, literally and figuratively. I used my Quest 2 to play walkabout golf today and the freedom is unparalleled.
 
iceberg187 said:
It's a differentior as a competitor. I used to what their Aibo when I was younger. I'm not paying 3 grand for a robot dog though, lol.

With the amount of studios that they have, they could throw an honest attempt at VR but I say this even owning both PSVR1, a Quest 2 and intending on getting PSVR2 day one, console attempts are going to be varying degrees niche if they have the need to be tethered to the console, literally and figuratively. I used my Quest 2 to play walkabout golf today and the freedom is unparalleled.
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Yeah its, im not really seeing it taking off either. On the other hands its good someone is trying to innovate in the somewhat stale console market now, with normal rendering/gaming graphics not leapfrogging so much anymore.
 
iceberg187 said:
With the amount of studios that they have, they could throw an honest attempt at VR but I say this even owning both PSVR1, a Quest 2 and intending on getting PSVR2 day one, console attempts are going to be varying degrees niche if they have the need to be tethered to the console, literally and figuratively. I used my Quest 2 to play walkabout golf today and the freedom is unparalleled.
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Yeah, I believe that wireless VR is a way to go.
 
cheapchips said:
I don't think anyone disagrees.

For PSVR it's a matter of cost. Eventually wireless will stop being prohibitive. Probably by PSVR3 or optimistically an addon for PSVR2.
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Wireless has its own problems. Even with the faster connections you need line of sight to maximize connection speeds.
 
eastmen said:
Wireless has its own problems. Even with the faster connections you need line of sight to maximize connection speeds.
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Yeah, no. The various wireless technologies differ massively in regard to this. I.e microwaves benefits massively for clear line between points but bluetooth signal propogation is entirely depended on the ability to bounce signals around and open space is a killer for bluetooth. For 3G, 4G and 5G signals, yes. But wifi generally not. There are things that kill 2.4ghz and 5ghz signals like wafer, steel or lead, but otherwise line of sight is less of an issue.
 
Microsoft announced their earnings today. Second quarter results of total quarterly revenue at 51.7B. Cloud grew to 22.1B 32% up. azure up 46% , Office 365 comercial grew 16% teams had 270m active users.

Everything seems to be doing really well for microsoft.

• Windows OEM revenue is up 25%
• Xbox content / services up 10%
• Gaming revenue up 8%
• Xbox hardware up 4%
• Surface up 8%

Microsoft’s Xbox Series X / S consoles have been on sale for more than a year now, and hardware revenue is up 4 percent, thanks to continued demand for these new consoles. Microsoft’s overall gaming revenue is also up by 8 percent after the company set a record $3.6 billion for the quarter in its previous Q1 2022 earnings. Xbox content and services revenue also increased 10 percent year over year.
- Best calendar year on record, beating previous high of 2021
- Total gaming revenue up 17.7% YoY
- Content & Services revenue up 8.8% YoY
- Hardware revenue up 63.3% YoY https://t.co/84MkOsnMkG


22B net profit. So by the time this deal closes they might have already made back what they spent.
 
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