I've never heard of this company, to be honest. I always assumed there was just Xbox, PlayStation and a lot of smaller game companies like Paradox Interactive and so on.
Maybe them coming from a less "open" country has to do with it...less coverage both in the US and abroad because it's not "local"...but yeah Tencent owns a ton with way less history in gaming than Microsoft, although they have owned League of Legends for over a decade now and that thing is huge!
I can see Microsoft keeping some Activision stuff on PlayStation but keeping EVERYTHING off Stadia and other conglomerate's platforms if they see Google, Facebook, and Amazon as their real competition
It really says something about how horrible Bobby ran things that Microsoft acquiring them makes people think things will improve when that's the exact opposite of how people think these acquisitions go down.
I mean I got a friend who works for Microsoft and she said that at least Microsoft takes it very seriously to stump down any sexual harrsment and such, they run a tight ship when it comes to protecting workers well being, shame about almost everything else they do
The reason for that is because Phil Spencer is adamant about devs doing what they want to do. Not what Xbox wants them to do. Toys for Bob won’t be a COD support studio anymore and a ton of dead IPs will most likely come back.
Usually companies are bought out when they are promising or doing well. Once those companies are bought out, the higher ups that ran that company are either fired or converted to the new order. So now the higher ups that made the company great are gone, they bring their own people whk don't run the newly aquired company as well as they should
@@CBRN-115 which i appreciate because it generally yields better quality products. they should put Phil Spencer in charge of windows development, maybe he could fix that up.
@@DiamondTurtleGamer without knowing why he deleted it for sure he uploaded it at 3AM then removed it. Probably because no one was up at the time in the US and he wanted more views on premiere.
Finally someone gets it, Microsoft is gonna leverage this purchase to drive people towards their Xbox ecosystem of console/PC/cloud. That means making the premium games like Call of Duty (not Warzone), Tony Hawk, Crash Bandicoot, etc exclusive to Xbox and PC. They’re not concerned about making their money back immediately because Activision is a long term purchase to gatekeep larger tech companies like Google and Meta from entering the games industry. As for Sony, it’s gonna hurt them if they don’t start offering similar services and features that are on Xbox. Losing Call of Duty is going to hurt them but that’s not happening until 2024, they have time to prepare for the inevitable blow it’s gonna do to playstation.
There not gonna take call of duty off playstation they make to much off of microtransactions that cutting off a whole console in hopes to get those payers to migrate to there console doesn't make sense
I'm in totally alignment with him on this one. I hate monopolies and Microsoft is freaking me out with all these acquisitions, but Activision needed someone to step in at the rate they're going.
Activision is a juggernaut. The controversies they are going through were never going to kill the company. It would have eventually found itself, stopped the bleeding, and pressed forward.. Maybe just a bit smaller. But shareholders aren't a patient or optimistic bunch. They want profits yesterday and the long term consequences of today's profits aren't their concern. So... Burn it down if you have to, just keep the stock value high.
@@jarynn8156 Activision was loosing money and the evaluation went down, which is part of the reason as to why Microsoft could even buy them in the first place. Now that Microsoft bought them, there is potential for change. Just google their stock price history, in December 2021, Activision stock was worth half of what it has been at it's peak.
@@suparki123 Stock value isn't always an indication of profitability. In 2020, Activison-Blizzard reported 2 billion in net income. Activision-Blizzard has yet to report their Q4 '21 income, however even if they inexplicably only break even, their 2021 income will surpass 2020, which was already their highest income year in the company's history. Stocks dropped because of turmoil inside the company that threatened its long term health. The biggest drops occurred when talks of an ouster of Kotick started and when Activision-Blizzard employees started staging walkouts. Investors don't like instability. You are right, however, that the dip in stock prices is what allowed Microsoft to be able to grab them. You are just wrong on why the stock prices dipped.
Microsoft has a reputation of treating employees fairly well. Certainly NOTHING like Activision. Microsoft may have some weird ways of reviewing people sometimes but not sexual abuse. I think this purchase is a net positive for many lives even if it didn't change the games at all. I do think that Microsoft is going to bring back some of the old IPs which is even better.
As a Microsoft intern I agree. It isnt the greatest workplace in the world or anything but it isnt the worst either. The people are friendly and just like every other normal workplace
@@RockSolitude I want the workers to be treated better because nobody deserves that level of abuse. I also think that better treated workers will create better games.
Yeah... its even sadder that it took you at least 10 years to figure that out. not to mention "Best quote" means you technically stole it from someone ;) Think for yourself sometimes, might get you places instead of being delayed by 10 years.
@@WhatisAPaladin what? Im just quoting what he said cause its funny and true. Ive been saying this too. your implying that Im behind or something? What about me aggreeing with I think your a child if you care about console wars triggered you?
@@WhatisAPaladin you think this video blew my mind with that quote?? That’s hilarious. Its just cool to see someone in a video talk about how dumb people who care about console wars are because I see people who care about console wars every day.
@@WhatisAPaladin Did he strike a nerve or something? Are you one of those eternal 12 year olds that still have brand loyalty? Why the intense hostility? i'm curious.
The problem with Microsoft’s acquisition, is Microsoft is orders of magnitude larger than anyone else in the console gaming industry. Microsoft could buy up every single other major publisher(besides tencent) and not even feel it. They could buy both nintendo and Playstation and stil have money left over. I’m very concerned by this
Why would these companies sell? Activision Blizzard was in a downward spiral for a long time (fuck you bobby), while Nintendo literally laughed at Microsoft when they tried to do it
I forsee this acquisition having one of 2 possible longterm outcomes. Either microsoft uses its vast riches to consolidate the industry under its umbrella, or the 4 ultra big tech companies take over the industry. Neither of which will be a good outcome
Probably the latter, as that technically skirts the monopoly laws. Sure, only four companies own the market, but they "compete" against each other, thereby offering the consumer choices. Sorta like the automotive industry.
@@WayOutGaming Not really. Xbox has been in this industry for over 2 decades. The other big tech companies don't give a F about gaming and never will. It's ONLY about the money for them, as opposed to Sony/Nintendo/Xbox who also care about money sure but have a passion for gaming as well. I trust MS a million times over the likes of Tencent, Amazon,Facebook or Apple. Even more so in gaming.
Lots of good points in this video. I think you're right, this isn't about fighting sony, its about fighting facebook and Amazon's streaming services. They see where the future is going and they are merely claiming a piece of the pie
I think that the next big move from Sony will be bringing the PS2 library to their later consoles. It would be the BIGGEST nostalgia mine that anyone has ever opened. It would also give them a service to challenge the game pass
Sony's PC ports are also a great example of their recent pro-consumer strategies. It's an easy way to take older exclusives that have had their time in the sun on PlayStation and make some extra cash off of them while also expanding their general audience. I don't think the majority of PC gamers are interested in a console in general, since their PC already has most of the same games and can do the same things better. They're definitely more open to getting a Switch as a supplementary handheld, but Steam Deck might put a damper on that. People are definitely still gonna be interested in Mario and Zelda, but I don't really see people clamoring for PlayStation exclusives in the same way (unless that exclusive is Bloodborne). My point is, Sony making PC ports allows them to sell their former exclusives to a demographic they haven't been able to reach before, and it's been a huge success for them so far. Horizon Zero Dawn and God of War sold insanely well for them, as did third party ports like Death Stranding and Detroit: Become Human. I remember reading about how Sony made like a 250% return on investment for Horizon, it's extremely lucrative. And most importantly, it earns them brownie points from the PC community. Maybe those PC gamers will even finally be convinced to get a PlayStation once Horizon Forbidden West and God of War: Ragnarok come out.
Why would I do that? Owning a PS5 does not appeal to me, and it never will. It's a $500 box that plays games worse than my main gaming system and is far more restricted in what I can do with my games. I'm happy to get Sony games a year or two later, it's not like I'm hurting for unplayed games since PC game libraries never get smaller, and the fact that the egs gives away a free game every week, steam throwing large sales almost monthly, it's not hard to amass a huge to-play list. I can wait for games, and a little goodwill isn't enough to get me to waste money.
Crappy ports that still have major issues a year after launch doesn't seem pro-consumer, more like an incredibly lazy attempt to cash in on the pc gaming market thats rapidly leaving them behind.
The only thing that the PC ports did prove is that the trademark Sony exclusivity should have died decades ago. There hasn't been a reason the get a console since after the PS2 era. Any box after that has been a neutered PC anyway. Even the price point is only relevant because of recent shortages. What will I even get with a PS5? Most of the big titles are rumored to get ported soon anyway. I guess I won't have Bloodborne and the SpiderMan game. Oh no.
Its amazing, and taking of the games quality, that seven years and a new console generation on its still a major consideration over whether we’ll be able to play bloodborne. That game is so unbelievably good, truly a legendary experience
Ultra rich kids tend to blow through their inheritance real quick if they lack any financial acumen for their own. These guys mostly live pretty high maintainance lives.
Riches that comes fast goes fast, remember the lottery winners and professional athletes soon broke, to be rich for a long time intelligence is necessary
70 billion dollars is an impossible amount of money to comprehend, like wow. hearing that number spent on a company that makes games sounds like such a waste in my mind, it's kind of weird
Considering it as long term investment and the games that are in Activision library, they can only profit unless a global economic apocalyptic collapse happens, which is also possible
Remember, with this purchase, Microsoft is only at 10% of the market share. That's the same amount that Sony was at a few years ago. And while they could go out and acquire more and more, they won't be looking to spend that 70B again, they got lucky with Activision. Microsoft could theoretically become a gaming monopoly, but boy would it hurt to try, and Tencent is so big that it probably wouldn't threaten them.
Hope that this scares them into being less of an a**hole. Mario Ofissey is still priced 60 bucks on their online store even today...they just never discount first party titles ^^
@@RockSolitude they never cares for CoD and they are right to do so. However releasing HD remakes of Mario games for an artificial limited time is more worrying
11:30 overwatch was on all consoles so of course it sold more. Considering Sony is the largest in the market, their own gamepass, combined with exclusives could really help. And they still could buy smaller studios to make games.
Spyro 4 Easter eggs in Crash game. I think we haven't heard from new games yet is because of this which has been going on for a year. More crash and Spyro is the icing
Pressed on the notification first thing, since the last time I tried to watch, the vid was oddly removed. Anyways I'm glad to watch, especially when a blizzard is nearly blocking my front door.
I was drawn to Xbox during the 360 days because of the community, but I stayed due to PlayStation's insanely idiotic decision to not support backwards compatibility for older games. Now that Xbox bought Bethesda, I'm staying permanently. I love Uncharted and God of War, but man. Sony is so in over their heads and are starting to make the same dumb decisions that Nintendo is making.
Millions left the 360 to the next ps4 because of the cod rights Sony got and lack of xbox games. Im a Sony player but this gen ive been drawn to Xbox and once Bethesda was announced I new I was getting one and after this acquisition most of my friends are wanting one for cod.
@@10cody7 Old playstation is gone sadly. Modern day playstation has more in common then xbox than ps1 or ps2. I wish we could go back to the old days when they were more japanese focused and had tons of variety. Ps4 had some hope with games like persona 5 but now playstation doesn't care about japan and is just putting all their games on pc.
if psychonaughts 2 is any indicator of things to come under Microsoft, i'm predicting a big jump in good, well made games at least for about a decade. i hope
I think it’s quite obvious what Phil Spencer was hinting at with that tweet. He wants Sony to put game pass on playstation and unless they do franchises will keep being locked away.
I think Overwatch 2 will either be canceled or heavily delayed. It’s been delayed so much and with the Blizzard buy out will definitely have a big effect on the game.
I'm not sure why this was reuploded. Skimming through the video. I don't see obvious changes when i watched it before it was taken down. Glad to see it up again.
Many underrate Microsoft, the thing is, almost every government in the world runs on Windows, like entire bureaucratic structures from top to the bottom in every country uses Windows, and that not counting offices of all big, middle, and small companies around the world. Microsoft have reliable stable flow of money, not depending on trends unlike, say Apple.
Which is a problem. Unless you completely isolate that computer from any connectivity, you can't be sure it won't get screwed up by an update from Microsoft. One botched update could bring a large chunk of your government's activity to a halt for days or weeks until Microsoft can fix it. Oh, and there's the issue of having to trust they're not adding backdoors at the request of the US government. Backdoors that may be discovered and exploited by hostile governments, or malware, or malware written by hostile governments. If you're a government and you're serious about security, stability and sovereignty, you're going to want to move to open-source software you can assign your own programmers to contribute to the maintenance of. To make the transition as easy as possible for your staff, do it a bit at a time. Replace IE/Edge/Chrome with Firefox one month. Replace Outlook with Thunderbird the next. Replace Microsoft Office with Libre Office the month after that. A couple of months after all the regular applications have been switched, replace Windows with Linux Mint (I'm nominating that because it's specifically designed to be friendly to ex-Windows users). Will there be some systems you can't make the switch on? Of course. There's still plenty where you can, though, and switching those will at least ease your burden and expense of dealing with stuff made by possibly foreign companies.
Love your videos, and as always this one was top notch. Thank you.. Xbox is damn good this generation. I jumped off the Sony train back in August when I got a Series x.my Ps5 hasn't even been turned on since cause my Series x is always on.i was Fortunate enough to be able to find 2 more Series xs for my sons,so we get to play co op together and it's absolutely fantastic!! Gamepass is awesome, and so far this month alone I've earned $30 or about 3 months of gamepass ultimate in rewards points. Absolutely loving Xbox right now!!!
I expect this will be the last big purchase Microsoft makes in a while. The reason in my opinion they were able to get away with Bethesda and now possibly Activision is because compared to other big tech companies, Microsoft hasn't been under the fire like other big tech companies and if Facebook tried to buy Activision, they would almost certianly face extreme legal backlash. I expect Microsoft will now be under the radar.
It's smart of Microsoft to keep the current Act-Bliz games on multiple platforms for now, if only to fulfil the contractual obligations but after those are done, I think Microsoft just makes all of those games Xbox/PC exclusive and either the Playstation gamers will have to either get an Xbox/PC or they'll just have to go without. Really smart business decision on Microsoft's part.
As a former playstation fan I hope they get obliterated. Sony has done too much bad to gaming. I am especially ticked whenever I hear about how they are treating the Japanese developers. So many games rushed, cut up, and content scraped to meet Sony's ever shifting whims. And to be honest I'm still extremely bitter about the time they adopted Xbox's subscription model.
@@alw2839 Yep, back in the day Xbox was the only one that did pay for multiplayer. Sony could have used this to demonstrate the difference between how each company treats its customers. Instead one generation later they came out with their own version. Now multiplayer subscriptions are mainstream and games are having less and less local co-op capability.
I love the console war, i think brand loyalty is stupid, but competition makes for better games and services for consumers. At this point if microsoft wants to scorched earth, brand loyalty would be the only thing making it a race at all
If Microsoft wanted to go scorched earth they would cut off Sony's deal with the Azure servers. Playstation as we know it would be impacted for a very long time.
I have not read a single article, watched a single video about this. I only got interested when Tyler made a video, because I knew that I would hear those 3 magic words. For a second there I though he wouldn't say them but I was not dissapointed.
7:31 I assmebled a PC capable of playing PS4 games (currently playing FF7R) only to play Minecraft 1.7.10 with 60 mods without it crashing. While the game itself is quite light, when you mod it enough you need more than a potato pc to run it properly.
If the activision titles do end up being exclusives, I hope it means that Sony will finally get off their ass and make new entries for Resistance, Socom, and Killzone lol.
I feel like Sony could try something a bit more crazy. Perhaps it might be worth a gamble to go less for big AAA titles and instead start a campaign of promoting or sponsoring smaller Studios and developers. I am thinking of the ps2 days here, where there were so many games and the sheer amount of supply to meet the young gamers demands. I do believe that some sort of radical change in business strategy like that perhaps actually turn out to be worth the risk. It would be at least something unconventional, since the conventional way of competing with Xbox, by buying rights to certain studios or whatever, is not something they can do. Sony has to use some sort of guerrilla tactics or otherwise accept deals that are not ideal for them.
Indie games will never reach the levels of revenue that AAA games reach, they aren't as marketable as the latest and greatest in graphics and action that AAA games tend to go for. What they have been doing is funding AAA games from newer studios like Horizon Zero Dawn or Days Gone.
I think, that games with in-game purchases will stay on PS5, because, well, money, but games that don't have one or it isn't big part of the game, those games may not be on PS5
love how i find this a year later and him pulling up the whole ass anime outro for the likelihood that bobby kotick will be leaving activision blizzard because its such a fucking cathartic and relieving thing for him, and then followed by just "fucking, fuck you bobby"
Over the course of 30 years (how long it would take MS to recuperate the costs at face value), Activision has a lot of sequels that it can build to bring in tons a revenue. I couldn't imagine it would take anywhere even remotely close, but I admit I didn't do any math.
Value survived because they stopped making games (owning a distribution platform is way more profitable). Sega is still around because they realised it is too expensive to create hardware, and Nintendo is still around because they realised that you have to have strong software support with hardware. I think Microsoft has figured out a combination of all of these. Own the IPs, make it available to as many people as possible, don't create and support expensive hardware (let others do it), and have a strong first part library. I suspect their new motto is "If you can't beat them, join them". Just look at what they are doing in the open source space.
I could only imagine what’s going through the heads of the Sony’s PS executives. I would like to imagine when making a new deal regarding what they can use from Activision, Microsoft will say “We are merciful gods so we will let you participate and continue to feed your families but remember… if you do anything we don’t like at any time, *we have the power to vaporize you* ”. I know that’s very unrealistic but come on that would be funny
I remember in 2020 when Phil Spencer said Sony weren't even their real competition. It made zero sense at the time. It was hilarious. But damn, Phil....
All the retail WoW players are so used to be being f'ed over that they are actually optimistic about the acquisition. Those poor fools are about to be raked over the coals for nth time.
No Xbox isnt ActiBlizz they allow thier devs to make things as THEY see fit.. This is the best possibility ActiBlizz devs have at being great again.. No more yearly CODS no more terrible rushed WoW expansions and most likey WoW & Starcraft console ports..
I didn't Realize that Sony was Valued so little compared to Microsoft that I start to wonder if there are deals going on now or in the Future from Google, Facebook or Amazon to buyout Sony since 1 of them could Offer a lot of money to pick up a well known brand to sell their version of the game pass of their product to directly sell on the console market to compete with Microsoft and possibly Valve on the PC.
70 Billion dollars... just imagine how many great games could be produced with 70 billion dollars... (well pretty much 70-140 and if they're good they will cover the expenses)
I think you need to add another zero. Only getting 70 games would require spending a billion dollars per game. $100 million sounds more reasonable (though still extravagant), and would get you 700 games out of it.
Nobody should feel bad for Sony when cod becomes Xbox only ((from the perspective of someone who owns a ps5 and Xbox one)) this is because PlayStation is the only thing that has been preventing. Crossplay between consoles since Xbox and ninetendo have been working together for crossplay but sony says it would hurt the playing experience
I’m not a fan of this acquisition. In the short term, its probably god considering the stuff happening at activition, but in the long term… not so much. Microsoft has had anti-trust ambitions in the past, and they have more than enough money to bring the gaming industry under its monopoly
Honestly I think this is a really good thing. They treated their employees as bad as it could get and the quality of their games was really recyclable. Microsoft has been going back to its roots finally and making great games. I couldn't think of any better company to buy activion, considering Sony doesn't care about morality so the abuse wouldn't stop, steam makes card games and Nintendo would never want it.
@@trueblade3636 Disney monopolised as much stuff as it could and no one seems to care. Sony has definitely done the same with Japanese companies. I'm against monopolisation, but I'm just happy activion won't be shit anymore
I just hope Microsoft will do a remake or, even better, a sequel to Brutal Legend. That game was awesome and I really think it could work as an exclusive title if they're looking for games they can make that change for.
