So I’m seeing this headline and it supposedly mainly pertains to XBox. Then there’s:
“According to extracts from a hearing, Phil Spencer said that to remain engaged in the industry, Microsoft would require significant and rapid growth in PC-first gamers and cloud-first gamers by fiscal year 2027. Otherwise, the company may consider the option of stepping away from the business altogether.”
What would this mean for the Activision Blizzard sale to Microsoft and the future of Diablo III? Is Microsoft just going to abandon gaming entirely?
A few days ago he said something along the lines of “AAA companies are stupid… because they aren’t using Game Pass”…
He always seem to be trying to talk their dreams into reality.
Only more so when it comes to the ATVI acquisition, which the “leaving the industry by 2027” thing seems to come from. Where their goal has been to make themselves look weaker than they are. “We might not even exist in 2027, so no harm in us buying ATVI” seems to be exactly that.
Heck, last year they had a brilliant comment about how Sony and Nintendo were better at making games than they were (so please let us buy ATVI!)
Later, it backed up this point further: “Sony has more exclusive games than Microsoft, many of which are better quality. […] Both Sony’s and Nintendo’s exclusive first-party games rank among the best-selling in Europe and worldwide. Current Sony exclusive content includes prominent first-party titles such as The Last of Us, Ghost of Tsushima , God of War , and Spider-Man.”
The future of PC gaming is cloud gaming. And that is when it will explode in popularity again. When you don’t actually have to buy a machine to run top of the line graphic intensive games. All you’ll need is a great internet connection. And the technology is at a point where that is very much a possibility for the majority of the market.
Hopefully Microsoft isn’t that much lacking in vision to understand this.
They aren’t going to leave the gaming industry. If anything they’re more likely to just diversify into AI-driven markets where they may incur a front loaded capital venture cost, but reap huge dividends from the AI generated content.
Physics still rules the roost. This could work for non-twitch reflex based games, but anything that requires true or close to real time interaction falls flat even with DOCSIS 4.0’s low latency mode. Latency is still king and is the reason cloud gaming hasn’t truly taken off yet.
They haven’t bought it yet. If Micro$oft does buy it and leaves the gaming industry that means either shut Activision Blizzard down or sell it. That is after all what happened with Vivendi. Blizzard is all in on the software as an online service model but not only is that model taking a beating without cloud gaming it probably has no future anyway. The problem is you can’t get people to play nine games a day for eight hours each. There’s no room for expansion and corporations are all about expanding income these days.
