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Microsoft buys Activision Blizzard; Impact MMORPG genre and Ashes, short and long term?
McMackMuck
Member
How do you feel about Microsoft buying Activision Blizzard?
Impact on MMORPG genre? Market share, WOW decline, other brands that could be MMO?
Impact on Ashes of Creation? recruitment, player base, pricing wars?
Short term, long term?
Would Microsoft step away from p2w for a single game?
Impact on MMORPG genre? Market share, WOW decline, other brands that could be MMO?
Impact on Ashes of Creation? recruitment, player base, pricing wars?
Short term, long term?
Would Microsoft step away from p2w for a single game?
0
Comments
I think it has zero impact on AoC. Why would it affect this game?
I don't see it having much of an effect on us here.
Specifically for Ashes I am not too worried of the impact in the immediate future.
I doubt they really care all that much about WoW.
This is going to be an added promotion tool to convert people over to Windows 11 and whatever devices other than PC that contain that new OS.
This will have no impact on gaming that is dedicated toward those who take games as a main hobby at home.
It’s a smart move by Microsoft, they consolidate their investment in the top two FPS games. Not to mention the Diablo, Warcraft, and Overwatch IPs (and their licensing agreements).
There’s a part of me - the one that excitedly bought Warcraft 2 and stayed up till 4am making maps - that mourns the death of Blizzard.
My guess for some time has been that the real WoW-killer would be WoW itself. That the game would buckle under its own weight. Seems fairly close to reality.
You would be wise to support small devs and grass roots projects like Ashes.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Yhr9WpjaDzw
Regarding AoC, I think that will make us more unique and a potentially stronger market position. AoC will fit into a Differentiated niche, which can lead to a profitable and healthy business (reference Porter's Five Forces model).
WoW killed itself (it can do a comeback with good work, etc. but the time of wow is behind)
So this buy won't affect anything in MMORPG.
one thing could impact : gamepass.
Microsoft could use WoW to test to have no direct subscription, but just a little increase in the gamepass :
We would have so the gamepass, and gamepass + X$ to access to any mmorpg (in a subscription system, hoping NO cash shop... i know i dream awake ^^')
aside of that... nothing
I think MS will run their own ethics training program at Act Blizz within the first 12 months, which should be a breath of fresh air for decent employees and a wake up call for any remaining offenders from the old regime.
Overall I feel like the consolidation of power is a bad thing. MS, like all the big players, try to monopolize markets by simple inobtrusive (ok, $68.7b stands out!) incremental steps that seem reasonable until you step back and look at the big picture. Setting up Game pass for market domination is just another one of these.
It's okay so long as there is effective competition keeping each specific market healthy. The console market is a 2.5 horse race at the moment, which makes me think Sony and Nintendo probably need to combine to try to compete with Xbox, but there are obstacles to that.
No impact on Ashes in the next ten years, I feel. Beyond that, too many variables to speculate.
Nintony?
SONYNTENDO works the same(slightly better) in katakana characters as it does in English as far as I can tell.
If Nintendo believe they can survive with exclusive IP, a loyal fan base and lower spec consoles then there's no reason for them to sell out to Sony.
It's not like WoW will become a good game now or WoW 2 will come out.
The MMO-RPG genre has been creativelly bankrupt for almost two decades and this recent acquisition isn't going to change anything.
Maybe AOC will change this. Based on what it promissed its got a good chance of doing that.
Maybe not.
We'll see.
The game started rotting since late vanilla patches but it only started smelling by Cataclysm.
Flying for everybody, instance finder, old expansion content simply being forsaken, the story being trash and a ''here let me hold your hand baby'' game philosophy, started showing their ugly head long before sub numbers started dropping and the magic dissipating.
The main reason WoW sub numbers kept growing until cata was because WoW's core was a good one.
Sure, some good changes such as arenas, perfected raiding, achievements, etc were also still appearing up until WOTLk, that is true.
The lesson game devs like Intrepid should note here is that decline usually doesn't come in the form of a bullet to the head. It's often a death by a thousand needles.
FF14 also showed that success (relative at least) sometimes doesn't come in the form of a big over-night hit but is often if not even most times a long journey.
The whole Warcraft/Starcraft IP is incredibly popular. Warcraft 4, Starcraft 3, Hearthstone 2. Massive moneymakers if made well.
Imagine a Classic+ (new expansions starting from where wow vanilla ended BUT in the spirit of vanilla wow) done right.
Now that would be a big thing for the genre and a big money maker.
But realistically, none of these will ever happen.
It's just going to be the same degenerate-perverted-pseudo-Blizzard sending the checks from the WoW earnings to someone else realistically.
Don't get me wrong.
I wish I things would change for the better. But realistically they wont.
Starcraft MMO would be pretty sweet. Though, not sure how it'd work.
So yeah, Microsoft still have a long way to go before they are even ahead of Sony, let alone forcing Sony to consider working with Nintendo.
I don't think Microsoft will start throwing resources and even more money at a company they purchased for 70 billion.
Long-term effects on Blizzard products (WoW, SC, etc because nobody really gives a fuck about candy crush) are largely unknown. It depends on how controlling Microsoft is and how much freedom they give to the management and by proxy the game designers and devs.
Long-term effects on the genre as a whole? That's a very hard question to answer. It depends on WoW's performance after there has been a 'cultural' switch from Boby Kotick to the new C management. It also depends on how other MMORPGs on the market perform. If everything else is trash and WoW is, again, the most popular and slightly interesting choice, then nothing will really change
https://www.shacknews.com/article/128392/how-much-money-does-candy-crush-make#:~:text=Looking at past earnings reports,for the three-month period.
Relevant excerpt:
Looking at past earnings reports from Activision Blizzard, the parent company of King, tells us just how much money Candy Crush has been pulling in. In the company’s Q3 2021 earnings report, it’s revealed that King earned $652 million for the three-month period.
I know Candy Crush is profitable (by far the most profitable franchise in ActiBlizz), but it is profitable because of the nature of the game and the predatory tactics used to squeeze more moolah from users.
Nobody gives a fuck about that franchise apart from the people who make money from it. In comparison, a lot of people want to see more of WoW, Diablo, Starcraft and they want to see those games improve.
Regular people don't give a fuck about Candy Crush because it's a zombie game. There are a million others like it.
If Microsoft just cares about the money, then realistically, nothing will change.
I don’t know how much, but I would play it.
You'd expect (I did originally) a game almost 20 years older than its current version to be worse, not better but by God was it 100 times better.
I just can't understand how a game could degenerate so hard.
Even with it being very very very poorly managed (armies of bots everywhere and nothing being done about it, servers failing and not being merged but left to rot instead, very badly managed layering which made the world feel unpopulated and ruined the economy, serious server issues because Blizzard decided to go the cheap route and not buy the decent amount of server spaces, the worse versions of Alterrac Valley being chosen, etc) it was an amazing experience.
I logged on like twice to retail and just couldn't be asked to bother.
The gameplay looked and felt unfun, everything look ridiculously over the top-silly and eye-overwhelming, the UI felt clunky and too small and people described the experience of simply getting to the point where you can play the game as a second job rather than a game (something you do for fun).