Yea the surface go and now laptop go are also part of the play into education. Microsoft gives away a lot of educational office licenses. The problem is they are too late to the market with the hardware. Chrome books suck. we all know it and the ones they give students really suck they are $200-$400 machines. The problem is windows is not light weight. It runs worse than chrome os does on that ultra low end hardware. Even the laptop go is to expensive for the market but at least they are getting close. I really think big/little intel and amd cpus could help them crack the market in a way they can't right now.
Microsoft rumored to be buying...... [2020-04, 2020-07, 2020-11]
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Yea the surface go and now laptop go are also part of the play into education. Microsoft gives away a lot of educational office licenses. The problem is they are too late to the market with the hardware. Chrome books suck. we all know it and the ones they give students really suck they are $200-$400 machines. The problem is windows is not light weight. It runs worse than chrome os does on that ultra low end hardware. Even the laptop go is to expensive for the market but at least they are getting close. I really think big/little intel and amd cpus could help them crack the market in a way they can't right now.
Windows 10X should help the software side too. That being as delayed as it has been is an issue for them. But it won't really make a huge difference in the short term, education purchases get locked in for a long time. They missed an important window with the pandemic, not that they could have predicted it. But having low cost devices with 10X out now, rather than out next year would have been really good for them.
Anyway, this is drifting a bit off topic.
I think, assuming they can figure out a way to disentangle the non gaming parts of Sega, that Atlus, Relic and Creative Assembly make them worth going after. Yakuza, Persona, Total War, and bringing all of the Age 4 dev work in house, as one of the the cheaper options out there? Yeah, that doesn't all help consoles, but they're trying to build PC game pass too, and CA would be a big deal there. So would a Persona 5 port.
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Deleted member 11852
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Educators don't care about being in Microsoft's business model, or how Microsoft perceive them. Minecraft was big in education before Microsoft bought Mojang. Why are you even arguing this?
Are you not understanding what I'm saying? I'm not sure how to be more clear. I'll try again.Educators don't care about being in Microsoft's business model, or how Microsoft perceive them. Minecraft was big in education before Microsoft bought Mojang. Why are you even arguing this?
Of course it was already popular with educators! It would have been a bad purchase otherwise. That was kind of the point. They bought something that was getting traction in education, and made it better for that market, while turning it into a service that could exist alongside their other education services and solutions, which made their entire education stack more attractive.
Minecraft for Education is not the same as the base Minecraft. There was no Minecraft for Education product prior to the acquisition. Educators were buying copies of PC Minecraft on their own and finding and using mods and custom levels on their own, they weren't being offered a tailored product in any official way. It was basically a hack job to take something not intended for educational use and use it anyway, not a product targeting the needs of that audience.
That's not how Minecraft for Education works. MS turning that into a service product has greatly expanded the reach of Minecraft in educational settings, the ease in setting it up and tailoring it to specific uses, as well as resolving support and purchasing/logistics issues (edit: and if you think none of that matters to teachers and school administrators idk what to tell you), and doing that was a deliberate part of a strategy to engage the education sector with MS services to remain relevant in the face of encroachment by Google with ChromeOS.
They bought it in large part for that, though not exclusively for that. It wasn't a strategic purchase for Xbox. It was a strategic purchase for other things.
I should add, Minecraft for Education was also not a product that Mojang could have created prior to the acquisition, despite the obvious market need, because they lacked the resources and infrastructure to do so. This was bad for both educators and Mojang. The former got a worse product for their needs, the latter had to leave a clear and untapped revenue stream on the table.
This is exactly the kind of scenario where a strategic purchase makes sense.
This is exactly the kind of scenario where a strategic purchase makes sense.
cheapchips
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It depends where you're biases fall. This site's convinced that it's Valve moving to NZ, since Gabe was over there having a lovely time when the pandemic was kicking off.
https://theempire.nz/valve-moving-to-new-zealand/
If only we can work out who Trent Baker and Mohan Goel are we can solve this!
As for selling, I'm curious as to why Valve would want to. Maybe the data says they should.
Hard to say how much a private company is worth. Seem to be estimated at $10bn+.
cheapchips
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Look like it was just this and Spencer and Newell were special guests
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Deleted member 7537
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Nobody knows, there is no public information about Valve financial statements probably only 2-3 people in that company knows the full figures. The 10bn for me is quite a conservative estimate (and it's also from Patcher which makes it way less believable). If Bethesda is worth 7.5 billion and only sells a few games a year and has to bear all the development cost, I cannot imagine Valve not being worth at least 3-4 times as much. The issue with Valve is they are self funding so no capital has been raised in probably a couple of decades (if ever, I'm not aware of any CR), so no way to know how much it is worth.
Valve has to have astonishing margins, they only need to a few servers any time they have new users, the marginal cost of each new user is close to zero and they collect revenue from everything sold on their store, from games to add-ons and hats. I mean, the sell keys for CS crates for 3 euros. That's 99.99% profit.
They do perform some internal development but have a small team for the services they provide, last estimate is 350-400 employees when they are the biggest gaming PC store (peaks of 21 million users concurrently, almost 100 million users registered).
I would be extremely surprised if they are not worth at least 20-30 billion. Not only because of the financials, but also because of how much their intangibles are worth. How much are worth the Half Life or Steam brands?
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So MS is buying Sega and Gabe was involved in making it happen ?
Lol
It depends where you're biases fall. This site's convinced that it's Valve moving to NZ, since Gabe was over there having a lovely time when the pandemic was kicking off.
https://theempire.nz/valve-moving-to-new-zealand/
If only we can work out who Trent Baker and Mohan Goel are we can solve this!
As for selling, I'm curious as to why Valve would want to. Maybe the data says they should.
Hard to say how much a private company is worth. Seem to be estimated at $10bn+.
Gabe is 57 so maybe he just wants to retire ? Most purchases require previous management to stay on for x amount of years. So maybe he figures he sells for a big pay day and he stays on for 3 years and retires at 60 ?
I mean for MS what do they really get from valve ? Steam is super popular , so they can just continue to run it and maybe integrate it into windows ? Although MS is making a huge effort to make the xbox stores as similar as possible across platforms. They could get a few big franchises but i don't know how much is in development from valve right now and if valve has enough teams to get everything fired up. They do have a good partnership for vr and now that oculus is going mobile only Valve is the big dog in pc vr. The knuckles controllers can be great for vr and hololens .
I dunno I think they could spend on another game company and get a better return on investment but what do i know
cheapchips
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Depends what MS want. I don't think Valve games and VR are useful to their Gamepass model. The tens of millions of active daily users are a tasty target though.
Crossplay on Windows10, PS4, Switch, Android and FireOS require an Xbox Live login. That's the first step in getting people into your ecosystem. Minecraft is a tool to get people into Microsoft services, and that's the real end game for Microsoft. At it's time of purchase, Minecraft was already culturally significant, and I would bet they make enough on merch to want to stop that. Having it as a back door tool to get people into Live services and sell t-shirts and blind bags to kids who play Minecraft on their parents Playstation makes total sense.
VR... Gamepass... VR ... I dunno man something tells me something VR related is brewing at MS
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Deleted member 11852
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Not impossible but they'll need regulatory approval. When your OS platform owners buys the largest online software store on the planet, you're giving to have to give regulators some assurances.
Microsoft is now buying Apple App Store and/or Google Play store?
cheapchips
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You tease!
It seem a shame that XSX only has 5Gbs USB ports.
Who says you need to use the box if all the processing is done in a wireless headset?
Tommy McClain
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Deleted member 11852
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Biggest in terms of choice of software, not profit. Neither of those stores sell software for Windows, macOS or linux, ironically they would be less contentious acquisitions should Apple or Google want to sell just their app stores.
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cheapchips
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Even for a stand alone WMR2, it's a missed opportunity if it can't connect to XSX.
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