Insomniac does not have any (popular) IP.
Microsoft acquires ZeniMax Media (Bethesda, id Software, Arkane + 5 more) [2020-09-21, 2021-03-09]
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Insomniac does not have any (popular) IP.
You miss the “and”. Having games that were birthed as first party wares is one thing. Buying popular multi platform franchises and turning them into first party titles is another.
No one here has been playing Uncharted an TLOU on their Xboxes over several generations only to see those games restricted to the PlayStation.
I’m not trying to justify the mindset only that this thinking is a reality amongst gamers.
Yes, i understand that. But in the end it's still the same thing, keeping certain games and studios tied to one platform, which excludes many games. It doesn't matter how a big corporation has created a situation like that, the result is the same.
Like Kojima expressed, he wants his games to be available to more then one restricted platform. I know for a fact some GG devs think the same.
I highly doubt ID would like the idea of their games being restricted to Xbox. I think that since Sony is rolling with this strategy, MS might take that direction too. It's a battle Sony is going to have a hard time winning, MS has much and much more sources to buy things out over the course of many years. In the end everything is about money.
Sony has played with the timed exclusivity with GTA back in the PS2 days. Now i don't think either are going to do this again, but that would be quite the thing, the next GTA or RDR exclusive (timed or not) to one of the platforms.
This sounds like the most aggressive acquisition I ve ever heard in the history of gaming. Doesnt this mean that all these multiplatform super hits will become exclusive to MS?
This is a form of unfair competition. Far worse than acquiring exclusive rights for a title for some time.
This is a form of unfair competition. Far worse than acquiring exclusive rights for a title for some time.
this is heptakill, too much to handle. Can you believe it? How can Sony respond?
I dont think you get it.
True. Everything is money as these are businesses after all. However, traditionally acquiring a bigger piece of the pie has always be tied to how much of the hardware market you owned.
MS can buck old traditions and stop trying to own the market. Being outsold 2 to 1 does not have as big of impact on your bottom line if you have a big publisher arm that supports the breadth of the market in some form or fashion.
Film and TV works in this way. Most films are ubiquitously released into theaters with no movie theaters company having exclusive rights. It’s only when you get to TV does exclusivity kicks in.
Have the whole console and PC gaming market pay for the development and marketing of your AAA games. Use your subscription services to differentiate your hardware and ecosystem. You sub is now full of titles that are essentially free.
This strategy change would probably not play well with entrenched market leaders but MS is not that and continually fighting for “hardware king of the hill” using traditional means doesn’t seem to be improving the situation. Where MS has been successful is by disrupting tradition.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
Well, to be fair, that 7.5 billion USD didn't get them just one AAA studio, it got them multiple AAA studios. And those aren't just any studios but ones with a passionate fan base. Skyrim surpassed 30 million in sales back in 2016. While I don't particularly like how small the games have gotten (they are still LARGE games), they are extremely well made for an open world sandbox that also happens to have a story attached it.
TES: online while not setting the world on fire has a passionate following that continues to bring in revenue. Fallout 76 isn't quite the crapfest it used to be (I hear it's actually pretty good now). If Starfield and the next TES game build upon the success of Skyrim without tacking on a crapton of microtransactions (like Fallout 76) then it has the potential to sell way more than 30 million copies...or potentially bring in 10's of millions of new subscribers to Gamepass...or both. Considering Microsoft has mostly abandoned microtransactions that gamers find unpalatable, I'd say the next TES has a better chance of succeeding under MS than it did under Bethesda/Zenimax.
Bethesda has multiple studios. 2 of them are obviously working on TES 6 and Starfield. Then they have ones working on TES: Online, Fallout 76 (and perhaps another unannounced Fallout game) and something else that slips my mind.
The next big studio in their portfolio is of course, iD Software which has done exceedingly well with the last 2 Doom games. Of course, they aren't infallible, they also had a bit of a misstep with Quake Champions...
Arkane Studios is the next big one in the portfolio. While they haven't set any sales records, their games are generally very well crafted and critically well received.
Then there's a bunch of smaller studios under the Zenimax umbrella.
They obviously won't recoup the 7.5 billion USD in the the first year or even the first few years. But like Mojang, this isn't about an immediate financial windfall, this is about long term revenue.
Regards,
SB
I get that. From a business perspective it probably makes a lot of sense, but it's also putting the eggs in one (or several) baskets so to speak. History will say whether it was a good acquisition or not.
well, I am not a big fan of exclusive games nowadays, although it seems to matter a lot. Btw, the tweet reply was meant to quote @Silenti 's post but I didn't quote him for whatever reason.
I think those games are going to come out for the PS, but perhaps they are going to use gamepass as a Troy horse in the ps5
...but don't worry, I'm sure Microsoft got plenty eggs for y'all.
Inuhanyou
Veteran
There is no situation in the history of the game industry where competing means to buy an entire major third party publisher (one of the last out of a handful) and their entire roster of 5+formerly third party developers to eventually lock all of said content away from competitors, as far as i know. And considering MSs agressiveness in this instance, likely wont be the last time.
My idea of competing in this modern space is to increase first party internal output by creating internal studios from scratch, perhaps buying a few studios that make sense, secure third party content and continue bolstering services.
Its not simply eating up entire portions of the business simply because one has the money to do so.
Ive said before, but ms or sony doing these sorts of things isnt competing. Its monopolizing, and monopolies are not competition in the free market by default.
I have to say. Someone unironically saying something to the effect of "id rather have a single trillion dollar mega corporation own everything in the game industry rather than third party publishers being independently active free to make their own deals based on mutually beneficial agreements" is one of the most embarrasing things ive ever read on this site.
Literally cyberpunk in real life. I cant continue anymore. Im checking out.
worse MS (with few exceptions) hasn't exactly been the best manager of the IPs they've acquired....
You do realize that Spider-Man was a multiplatform property for decades?
Disney spent billions on Fox, Marvel, and Star Wars and they're bringing all that content exclusively to their services as soon as they can. Why would MS treat their properties any differently? You're lowering their value to your service if you allow them to be treated exactly as they are today and put them on other services.
No, monopolizing would be buying Nintendo and Sony. Multiple 3rd party publishers have bought other publishers, this isn't any different other than the amount of money being exchanged and you not liking the company doing the purchasing.
this is history.
Y'all missed this: https://bethesda.net/en/game/orion
It sucks, and i can sympathize with that. But it's not so black and white. There are 3 companies that could pull this off, they all make significantly more money than Sony: Google, Amazon, and MS. Google and Amazon are building up their studios perhaps another go at cloud gaming, and MS needs to do something on two fronts here. 1 is to hold off Google and Amazon, and the other is to do something about the constant reminder of having no exclusives. And this was likely their best move here, when looking at all their tech and studios as a whole unit. This is what would be the best for them.
I don't necessarily agree it's to stick it to Sony and the outcome of these deals the story hasn't been woven yet.
MS has already done what you've written; picked up a great deal of many smaller studios, in hopes that over time they can become something larger. But that takes years, maybe decades to accomplish. Newer studios from scratch even longer. So many games are failures. So many games, so many studios. Ubisoft has been staffing here in Toronto for 8 years nearly now, and they are finally approaching their targeting staff of 800 IIRC. It takes a long time to build up game development studios, and the desire to make moves are now and not 10 years from now.
It's doubly unfortunate and shitty that yes, things played out this way, but it's also unrealistic to expect MS to do that and concede another 3-4 generations to do the things the 'proper' way. But there is no proper way in business. Merger and acquisition is business and the only proper way is to follow the laws that govern that. If MS didn't do it, Google or Amazon would, it would only be a matter of time. Sony might even have attempted it.
It's the shifting landscape that is always changing. But what can be said really, for how long did people ride MS and Phil Spencer about not having exclusive content and that Sony will always win because they have it. For how many threads on this very forum and others do we need to discuss the Sony exclusive games advantage and that Xbox will never succeed as long as they could never surpass this contention point. This event was bound to happen, a matter of when instead of a matter of if. For as long as MS wants to compete and others who have just as much money who also want to compete, this type of thing will happen.
Honestly, I think the exclusives argument is mostly nonsense; MS has plenty of exclusives that have done really well, they're just not catering to the same audiences. I don't think MS moves that many more XSXs on the back of the exclusives. It ends up being a wash at best and Sony has much better global brand strength, and more diverse brand strength in the US. Exclusives might make a difference at the margins in the US, maybe the UK, where they were close to even with PS4 this gen, though still a bit behind, maybe that flips and PS5 ends up a bit behind instead, but honestly, possibly not. Either way they never break into Europe or Asia no matter what they've got exclusive wise because they don't have the brand strength to compete there.
And without being able to compete there they're anyways going to significantly lag Sony. Xbox only drew to a tie with PS3, despite being out about a year longer, by selling 2:1 in the US. Sony dominated Europe and Japan even with the massive issues with the PS3 launch. Sony will only ever do that badly in the US again if they massively screw something up, and the PS5 doesn't look like it's going to do that. They're almost certainly going to outsell the XSX globally.
If anything is going to move the needle for MS it'll be expansion into new markets via things like game pass and streaming. Or hitting really low cost alternatives with things like the XSS. If the XSS does really well it could boost Xbox to a higher proportion of sales. But I doubt it'll change things that drastically.
I think MS knows this. They will still pursue exclusives because they do need them to some extent. But I don't think the Zenimax acquisition is about that at all. I don't think you make a 7.5 billion dollar investment for exclusives. You only spend that much money for strategic positioning and exclusives, by themselves, aren't enough to change the landscape. The last gaming purchase they made that was even remotely close to this was Minecraft; Minecraft is big enough that it could have maybe changed some buying habits and they didn't even try to cut off Sony's access when Sony was being intransigent about crossplay, which kept them on an older codebase rather than moving over to the cross platform bedrock version. Hell, even Minecraft Dungeons is on PS4.
Selling more Xboxes wasn't the goal there. Having an education product they could use to help sell other MS education products and getting the MS brand in front of millions and millions of children and parents was. If they wanted to sell more Xboxes and were willing to use $7.5 billion do it, they could have lowered the price of both devices by $100 and eaten the extra loss.
So I don't think this purchase is about exclusivity either. I think people will be surprised by how much stuff still comes to PlayStation. Not everything obviously. But more than you'd expect.
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