Microsoft rumored to be buying...... [2020-04, 2020-07, 2020-11]

[eastmen]

The issue is that MS has always had troubles with building the communities. They failed to attract people to Mixer, failed to improve Skype and Teams won over Slack because they attached it to Office 365 - on its own it would not be able to compete. If they implement something for Xbox/PC/XCloud maybe something will change. But like with Youtube and Twitch - purchasing the communities is easier and more effective way.

They bought mixer after twitch cemented itself as the video streaming site. They were never going to take over that market share. Then the POC female running it was completely toxic and they didn't want the bad pr and shut it down. They were perfectly fine to let it run as it was at the time if that never happened. Would have been easier to build an ecco system if they had mixer and then bought discord. They could have combined the two easily.

Teams beat slack because teams had robust video conferencing. Also don't forget that Teams competes with Google Classroom which has their own office suite built into it too .

I m not keen on where this is heading. MS is such a huge corporation with such huge amounts of liquidity that they gradually centralize a huge portion of independent services and products under their own umbrella, making it harder for competitors on the same services and products to compete. Unless another super huge corporation absorbs them, so we end up with an oligarchy of tech giants.
It is more preferable that some third party company merges with another and provide their services and products.
Sony's financial prowess gives them enough power to be innovative in gaming, but not enough to destroy competition. This is the 5th generation Sony has been in the market and they never acquired a super large company that used to produce popular products for other companies like Bethesda. They acquired smaller talented studios and made them big.
Nintendo is a super huge highly profitable company that provides it's own unique approach in the industry without disturbing the competition.
But Microsoft is literally trying to snatch competition out of the market, buy literally trying to buy own big franchises and in some cases the competitors themselves.

Isn't the whole reason Sony is in the industry because of their dominance of certain consumer electronic segments . Nintendo went to Sony because of their compact disc technology which lead Sony to releasing the PlayStation. The PlayStation 2 was a show piece for DVD and the ps3 was a show case for Bluray. At the start of the Ps2 generation a lot of people bought that console because of it being a cheap dvd player and same with ps3 and bluray players.

Would sony even be in the market if they didn't invent the cd with philips ?

If you need to make your titles exclusive to one platform just to keep people there.....

Isn't this standard business practice in the console world ? There were always exclusives as far back as I could remember which would be the mid 80s

 

[Deleted member 11852]

They bought mixer after twitch cemented itself as the video streaming site. They were never going to take over that market share. Then the POC female running it was completely toxic and they didn't want the bad pr and shut it down.

So Microsoft screwed up buying Mixer? All acquisitions by their nature are a bit of a gamble and entering into any new established market requires a huge investment. Being the new guy means you are already behind in the status quo and even when you have a really compelling product (Zune, Windows Phone) sometimes you can do everything right and still not topple market inertia.

Are you saying Microsoft shouldn't take gambles? They just shouldn't try anything new? Because I couldn't disagree more. I think they need product diversification more than ever. So they either need to be creating a new market, or buy their way into an existing one. Starting from scratch and trying to penetrate an existing market is barely viable even for massive companies.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Oh sure, Zenimax is far bigger, they're not on the same level. Im just saying they are not 9-10x bigger IMO. Its like they have fallout which is a huge title , and elder scrolls which used to be large in the PC world though its decreased a bit now,but others like their most famous title Doom, everyone knows it and loves it, like you and me. But its sales dont match its reputation eg the last game of the series launched in march 2020

NPD march 2020

1. Animal Crossing: New Horizons*
2. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare
3. MLB: The Show 20
4. Resident Evil 3
5. NBA 2K20
6. Doom Eternal*
7. Persona 5: Royal
8. Grand Theft Auto V
9. Borderlands 3
10. Mario Kart 8: Deluxe*

OK no digital there, but 6th in your launch month during march (not nov/dec where 6th is prolly good) means its not a massive title.

Compare it to another title recently talked about with sales numbers on these forums Days Gone https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/days-gone-sony-bend-ps4.58139/page-24

NPD april 2019

1. Mortal Kombat 11
2. Days Gone
3. MLB The Show 19

All this talk about days gone doing bad sales numbers but it absolutely crushed multiplatform Doom eternal just releasing on a single platform! Sometimes what ppl' believe just doesnt match realtity, look at the data.
I tried to find bethesda's and remedys revenue numbers but couldnt find, that would be insightful (sp)

No digital for Doom Eternal is relative large compared to your typical AAA release. A typical AAA release will see ~2/3 sales on console (~50% digital now days) and ~1/3 sales on PC (all digital). However Doom Eternal did massively better on PC than console. Launch week had PC selling ~1/2 to ~3/4 of all sales while consoles had the remain ~1/4 to ~1/2 of all sales (Doom Eternal Sales Top Steam Charts, Selling Over 700K Copies in Its Launch Week; PS4/XO Sales Estimated Between 250K-400K (wccftech.com)).

So, there was basically massively more digital sales for Doom Eternal than your typical AAA game. Adding in digital sales for Doom Eternal would see it's sales number roughly triple or quadruple in NPD. Where that would put it? Who knows without actual sales numbers for each title. I'd guess higher than MLB but maybe not higher than COD, so probably 3rd for the month.

Regards,
SB

 

[Nesh]

Isn't the whole reason Sony is in the industry because of their dominance of certain consumer electronic segments . Nintendo went to Sony because of their compact disc technology which lead Sony to releasing the PlayStation. The PlayStation 2 was a show piece for DVD and the ps3 was a show case for Bluray. At the start of the Ps2 generation a lot of people bought that console because of it being a cheap dvd player and same with ps3 and bluray players.

Would sony even be in the market if they didn't invent the cd with philips ?

I am not sure why you are confusing inventing and developing a product with buying out.

 

[ChuckeRearmed]

Isn't the whole reason Sony is in the industry because of their dominance of certain consumer electronic segments . Nintendo went to Sony because of their compact disc technology which lead Sony to releasing the PlayStation. The PlayStation 2 was a show piece for DVD and the ps3 was a show case for Bluray. At the start of the Ps2 generation a lot of people bought that console because of it being a cheap dvd player and same with ps3 and bluray players.

One of the interesting thing is that a lot of momemtun Sony gained by having cheapest CD player (not sure with PS1 I think?), cheapest DVD player (with PS2) and cheapest Blu ray (PS3)

 

[eastmen]

I am not sure why you are confusing inventing and developing a product with buying out.

Sony is only in the industry because it used the resources of a huge successful company in gaming already. When they first entered they purchased Psygnosis. During the ps2 years they purchased eidetic , aughty dog , icognito. Then in the mid 2000s they bought Guerrilla , Zipper, sigil , evolutions, bigbig. More again in the 2010s with Media molecule , Sucker punch , Gaikai . Again in 2019 they bought insomniac and then EVO in 2021.

Not sure why people are upset with MS doing what all other companies do.

 

[iceberg187]

I found this to be interesting as it shows the aftermath of an MS purchase currently.

Megan Starks and Nitai Poddar from Obsidian state the following

Says its refreshing and stress-free to be with a studio that isn't constantly worrying about budget and game pitches
- Obsidian has the best, most robust toolset of writing (narrative) that she has experienced and other XGS are requesting access to them
- No mandate from MS that everyone needs to use the same tools cause they don't want the games to be too samey
- MS encourages studios helping other studios but they don't force them to. Its organic if it happens
- Says its easy for XGS devs to get in touch with each other
- MS does summits. Says she attended a franchise summit, and they have a narrative summit coming up where people from every studio sends anyone who is interested to get together to share lessons/experiences/struggles/toolsets.

The writing toolset portion is true because I've seen it spoken on by Brian Fargo at inXile here.

https://gamingbolt.com/wasteland-3-...-dialogue-tools-from-obsidian-inxile-confirms

Speaking with GamingBolt, Brian Fargo – studio head of inXile Entertainmet – confirmed that Wasteland 3 borrows the dialogue tool that Obsidian Entertainment used in last year’s The Outer Worlds, which makes for “a much deeper and interwoven story than we’d been able to do in the past.”

When we asked him about whether players can expect Wasteland 3 to be just as reactive to player choices as past inXile games, if not more, Fargo said, “Absolutely. Aside from combat, the deep RPG decisions and narrative choices are a hallmark for the series, so we’ve spent a lot of time on them.”

“Our close relationship with the guys at Obsidian mean that we have access to their dialogue tools that they used for The Outer Worlds, and we’re using that to create a much deeper and interwoven story than we’d been able to do in the past,” he continued. “We also have a team of writers on this project, where for Wasteland 2 it was essentially just one guy—Wasteland 3 is a far deeper game in the way it pays off player choice.”

I didn't think this was worthy of its own topic but cool to show the other side of the acquisition and the synergy that is seemingly there amongst the studios.

 

[zed]

No digital for Doom Eternal is relative large compared to your typical AAA release. A typical AAA release will see ~2/3 sales on console (~50% digital now days) and ~1/3 sales on PC (all digital). However Doom Eternal did massively better on PC than console. Launch week had PC selling ~1/2 to ~3/4 of all sales while consoles had the remain ~1/4 to ~1/2 of all sales (Doom Eternal Sales Top Steam Charts, Selling Over 700K Copies in Its Launch Week; PS4/XO Sales Estimated Between 250K-400K (wccftech.com)).

Im sure it done better on PC than the consoles, due to its PC roots.
But like Im saying its reputation is larger than its performance, eg lets look at its ps4 players data from https://gamstat.com/games/ player != sale
Days Gone was supposedly a sales failure, true doom also gets the xbox & switch players, perhaps brings it up 2.5 million and then PC players it will still be less than days gone, Im very confident of this, just look how many ppl are playing it on PC

Even on the wiki page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_(franchise) it mentions
"Since its debut in 1993, over 10 million copies of games in the Doom series have been sold; the series has spawned numerous sequels, novels, comic books, board games, and film adaptations."
Sure over 10mil could be 100mill but its prolly somewhere between 10-20 million! One of the most famous game franchises of all time and this is what it musters

Doom eternal PC players numbers like above players != sales

https://steamcharts.com/cmp/782330,275850#All

I choose no mans sky cause it was a famous 'failure' but you can see just one month after doom eternal launches its already being played less than this 'failure' game that came out years before.
Now Doom eternal is a multiplayer game so why arent ppl playing it on PC?

Doom is one of those games(*) where its reputation is bigger than what it actually achieves now, In music terms its like
David Bowie, the who, bob dylan etc these are world famous artists I love but who have all sold less albums than maroon 5!

(*)Final Fantasy, Tomb Raider, Tekken, Halo, Bloodborne, Madden etc

 

[cheapchips]

Im sure it done better on PC than the consoles, due to its PC roots.
But like Im saying its reputation is larger than its performance, eg lets look at its ps4 players data from https://gamstat.com/games/ player != sale
Days Gone was supposedly a sales failure, true doom also gets the xbox & switch players, perhaps brings it up 2.5 million and then PC players it will still be less than days gone, Im very confident of this, just look how many ppl are playing it on PC

Even on the wiki page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_(franchise) it mentions
"Since its debut in 1993, over 10 million copies of games in the Doom series have been sold; the series has spawned numerous sequels, novels, comic books, board games, and film adaptations."
Sure over 10mil could be 100mill but its prolly somewhere between 10-20 million! One of the most famous game franchises of all time and this is what it musters

Doom eternal PC players numbers like above players != sales

https://steamcharts.com/cmp/782330,275850#All

I choose no mans sky cause it was a famous 'failure' but you can see just one month after doom eternal launches its already being played less than this 'failure' game that came out years before.
Now Doom eternal is a multiplayer game so why arent ppl playing it on PC?

Doom is one of those games(*) where its reputation is bigger than what it actually achieves now, In music terms its like
David Bowie, the who, bob dylan etc these are world famous artists I love but who have all sold less albums than maroon 5!

(*)Final Fantasy, Tomb Raider, Tekken, Halo, Bloodborne, Madden etc

DE looks like it's following a typical launch and tail off for a predominately single player game on Steam. Not quite sure what you're trying to demonstrate with the NMS comparison. It might have had a rocky start on social media, but it sold buckets loads. They have regular and really good updates that pull players back in to the game and boost sales. You can see where these have landed.

 

[zed]

DE looks like it's following a typical launch and tail off for a predominately single player game on Steam. Not quite sure what you're trying to demonstrate with the NMS comparison. It might have had a rocky start on social media, but it sold buckets loads. They have regular and really good updates that pull players back in to the game and boost sales. You can see where these have landed.

I was unaware doom eternal was a single player game, thanks I thought like most of the other doom games (doom3 excepted) it also had a strong multiplay aspect. Why NMS? I was just trying to think of any other title, I see days gone launches on steam in a few days we will see if this 'sales failure' manages to match doom eternal. Im sure doom eternal will generate more profits though as cost to develop is gonna be a lot less than a large open world game.

edit: here on these forums we also display the hype vs reality dichotomy as well
whats the yearly game franchise that sells the most?
COD, yet the threads about this, the biggest franchises ( along with GTA ) typically have bugger all posts

 

[cheapchips]

I was unaware doom eternal was a single player game, thanks I thought like most of the other doom games (doom3 excepted) it also had a strong multiplay aspect.

Probably could have phrased it better, but it's multiplayer is never going to pull APEX, Ghost Recon or whatever numbers. It's an addon to the main game.

 

[see colon]

Doom Eternal sold pretty well, made lots of money.

DOOM Eternal “generated over $450 million in revenue in the first 9 months of release”. If we were to assume that all of this revenue was generated purely from the sales of full-priced copies of DOOM Eternal, then it could be estimated that the game has sold 7.5 million copies.

Not sure that 7.5 million copies number is correct, because I think I got it on sale within the first 9 months. Also, there's DLC revenue, etc. But that's still a pretty good number. If we assume 7.5 is ballpark correct for 9 months, maybe assume another 1.5-2 million to finish out the first year and and it will have sold about 9 Million, which would put it at about half of what COD:WWII sold. Not bad for an FPS in a crowded FPS market I think.

Edit - Just remembered, the Switch port came 9 months after the initial PC/PS4/XBO release. They probably got a sales bump and closed out the year a little better.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

I think Remedy at $800 million is relatively worth more than $7.5 billion for Bethesda (nearly 10x as much, personally that would of been a better bet, 9 studios of remedy size vs 1 of bethesda)

To be frank, I had a much higher esteem of Remedy before than I have now. I didn't get to play Alan Wake but Max Payne 1+2 and Quantum Break were great games to me.
But now I'm playing Control and I'm really struggling to play the damn thing. That idea of keeping the player in the dark about what's happening around the character should only work for the first 2 or 3 hours of game. I think I'm > 8 hours in and IMHO the what-the-fuck-am-I-even-doing suspense is just getting obnoxiously boring. And the maps are so confusing..

I do wish Remedy all the best (Euroland developers yay!), but I think Control is a step back compared to Quantum Break though.

All this talk about days gone doing bad sales numbers but it absolutely crushed multiplatform Doom eternal just releasing on a single platform! Sometimes what ppl' believe just doesnt match realtity, look at the data.
I tried to find bethesda's and remedys revenue numbers but couldnt find, that would be insightful (sp)

During the interviews David Jaffe had with the Days Gone's artistic and technical directors, I think they all but confirmed the game did little more than breaking even.
They could be getting a revitalized source of income from the PC release, though.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Im sure it done better on PC than the consoles, due to its PC roots.
But like Im saying its reputation is larger than its performance, eg lets look at its ps4 players data from https://gamstat.com/games/ player != sale
Days Gone was supposedly a sales failure, true doom also gets the xbox & switch players, perhaps brings it up 2.5 million and then PC players it will still be less than days gone, Im very confident of this, just look how many ppl are playing it on PC

Even on the wiki page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_(franchise) it mentions
"Since its debut in 1993, over 10 million copies of games in the Doom series have been sold; the series has spawned numerous sequels, novels, comic books, board games, and film adaptations."
Sure over 10mil could be 100mill but its prolly somewhere between 10-20 million! One of the most famous game franchises of all time and this is what it musters

Doom eternal PC players numbers like above players != sales

https://steamcharts.com/cmp/782330,275850#All

I choose no mans sky cause it was a famous 'failure' but you can see just one month after doom eternal launches its already being played less than this 'failure' game that came out years before.
Now Doom eternal is a multiplayer game so why arent ppl playing it on PC?

Doom is one of those games(*) where its reputation is bigger than what it actually achieves now, In music terms its like
David Bowie, the who, bob dylan etc these are world famous artists I love but who have all sold less albums than maroon 5!

(*)Final Fantasy, Tomb Raider, Tekken, Halo, Bloodborne, Madden etc

Let's put this another way.

DOOM Eternal has made over $450 million in revenue | KitGuru

~3 million Digital copies in it's first month versus between 500k-1 million physical copies in the first month. Does that make it's placement on NPD representative of it's actual sales ranking when 4 of the titles ahead of it also included digital sales? The only title that also didn't include digital sales was Animal Crossing which as a Nintendo title not only has general fewer digital sales than games for other platforms ... but it's a Nintendo game.

Regards,
SB

 

[Nesh]

Sony is only in the industry because it used the resources of a huge successful company in gaming already. When they first entered they purchased Psygnosis. During the ps2 years they purchased eidetic , aughty dog , icognito. Then in the mid 2000s they bought Guerrilla , Zipper, sigil , evolutions, bigbig. More again in the 2010s with Media molecule , Sucker punch , Gaikai . Again in 2019 they bought insomniac and then EVO in 2021.

Not sure why people are upset with MS doing what all other companies do.

This falls exactly in line with:

This is the 5th generation Sony has been in the market and they never acquired a super large company that used to produce popular products for other companies like Bethesda. They acquired smaller talented studios and made them big.

But Microsoft is literally trying to snatch competition out of the market, buy literally trying to buy own big franchises and in some cases the competitors themselves.

Why are you so confused eastmen?

 

[eastmen]

This falls exactly in line with:


Why are you so confused eastmen?

I listed a whole lot of super huge companies that they purchased over the 5 generations they have been in console space. Why are you so confused Nesh ?

 

[Nesh]

I listed a whole lot of super huge companies that they purchased over the 5 generations they have been in console space. Why are you so confused Nesh ?

No you didnt list super huge companies or companies used to produce hugely popular multiplatform titles that were purchased by Sony. They were/are barely comparable.
Try again.

 

[eastmen]

No you didnt list super huge companies or companies used to produce hugely popular multiplatform titles that were purchased by Sony. They were/are barely comparable.
Try again.

Comparable to what ? super huge compared to what ?
Your the one who used vague terms that mean different things to everyone here. I can't find the purchase price of many of Sony's purchases so I can never tell you how it compares to bethesda. Also Sony started buying video companies almost 30 years ago. So what would have been a big purchase 30 years ago may not seem as big today.

Heck in the last year Sony has pumped in half a billion for 2% of epic.

and I know its wikipedia but

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_game_acquisitions

If we look here Sony is on this list of the largest video game purchases for Gaikai 2012 and insomniac in 2019 and it seems other purchases in their past were not public . You can also see with the list tha the top 12 public purchases were all after 2010 except for Bandai Namco in 2005. Even looking at the wider list the majority of large purchases were done after 2010. The most likely reason is the industry growth making all companies in the segment worth more (or at least successful ones)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...me-top-analyst-sees-industry-slumping-in-2019

Sony actually entered the market in 94/95 as sales started to dip after their 93 peak before startin to climb up gain in 1998


Again. Sony has invested heavily into purchasing companies to strengthen the PlayStation brand. They have done so since the very beginning of their history and its as strategic as them buying exclusives which dates back to their entry into console industry. Why is it good for the goose but not the gander ?

Its seem like an odd argument going on here.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Comparable to what ? super huge compared to what ?

I believe Nesh is asking for examples of where Sony bought a developer/publisher and in doing so, potentially deprived the cross-platform gaming market of huge critically-critically-accalimed IPs like Doom, Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Prey, Dishonoured, Wolfenstein and to less-huge but no less criticially-acclaimed, Pillars of Eternity, and Wasteland.

 

[Nesh]

......

We arent arguing if Sony bought a company throughout the years.

I believe Nesh is asking for examples of where Sony bought a developer/publisher and in doing so, potentially deprived the cross-platform gaming market of huge critically-critically-accalimed IPs like Doom, Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Prey, Dishonoured, Wolfenstein and to less-huge but no less criticially-acclaimed, Pillars of Eternity, and Wasteland.

Yes but he prefers to detract away the discussion from the facts. I dont think he wants to get it.

Heck even his link is shooting his own foot.
Gaikai+Insomniac summed are at $652 million.
Zenimax and Majong alone are at $10.2 BILLION. With Zenimax owing a large portfolio of famous multiplatfom IPs (not the case with either Gaikai or Insomniac). And thats excluding also that MS tried to make an offer to Nintendo and Square Soft.