The fact remains that you don’t get to argue conflict of interest after the fact if it was known to you and you okayed it beforehand.
Supposedly Microsoft is potentially prepared to spin off the UK operations of their cloud services into a separate company if that satisfies UK regulators. We’ll see if that’s what it comes down to, but I find it hard to see that the CMA wouldn’t be satisfied with that given how it’s their primary reason for blocking the deal.
Eh, it’s not that interesting. Gamedev is a relatively small industry in terms of personnel and lots of people know one another. You’re also more likely to make acquisitions when you know the people in charge of the company you’re acquiring.
that has nothing to do with anything in respect of M&A…it can be a hostile take over, or it can be for vertical or horizontal integration, knowing a person has nothing to do with the purchase though.
I’m not sure why you’re trying to argue with me on this. If I’m looking to expand my portfolio I’m much more likely to acquire a company run by competent people I’ve worked with in the past than I am complete unknowns. This isn’t some kind of double blind experiment.
because purchasing a company ‘because you know someone’ is not a solid business decision.
im also not arguing with you, im pointing out a fact.
MS long time dream to buy Blizzard is finally real.
Seems like there is another rumor that Blizzard is making Starcraft 3. I would be nice if that true. I wish they remaked Reforged edition to how it was supposed to be and announce Warcraft 4.
Let’s just ignore the thousands of indie studios and the diversity of games they produce every single day.
There is more variety in gaming than there ever was. You people just don’t want to see it for some weird reason. Guess what? Gaming is more than EA and Activision Blizzard.
AAA gaming is consolidated for obvious reasons (development costs of 200m$ for a game being the main one). But AAA games represent like… idk, less than a tenth of a percent of all decent games, probably.
And the second an indie studio has a really successful game they get bought. Most indie games aren’t a commercial success.
Is that bad? I’m sure the indie developer that sells has a strong opinion to the contrary 
Doesn’t change anything, though. The game has already been made at that point, so it exists → diversity. Big studios buying small studios doesn’t reduce the amount of indie games on the market (maybe in some extreme cases where they literally stop selling it, but that’s not usually how it goes).
No, but it does reduce the number of good indie studios on the market. So to your other question
Yes and no. It’s not bad that a AA or AAA studio buys an indie studio necessarily. It can mean more money so they can spread their wings. But when that studio becomes part of a behemoth like ABK then it gets really corporate and yes I think that is bad. I don’t think Overwatch 1 would have been made by Activision. Games like Starfield won’t be available on PlayStation now that Microsoft owns Bethesda. Ultimately, most big companies make safe decisions based on money not creativity.
The employees can go right ahead and make a new one 
But anyway, point is there is more diversity now than there ever was in gaming. More games released per year than ever before. Anyone saying it’s worse today is being willfully blind.
I told anyone who would listen, “I love Blizzard games, but the day Kotick is no longer the Head Honcho is the day we ActiBlizz gamers throw a party that would make the Beastie Boys and Andrew W.K extremely jealous”. Let’s hope that day is very, very close.
eh cloud gaming can just go die and flop it’s not the future nobody want to play any game like this
well if they fixed BO3 matchmaking on steam too that would be W for everybody since the modding community is still alive and kicking
In b4 Microsoft prunes out all the dead games and puts Overwatch on life support.
If UK still reject, well people will not have access to any MS cloud games anymore (aka you will not be able to access xCloud or ABK Games on other cloud services). Because CMA still hitting same key about cloud and blah blah blah.
Let me guess again, an sonyst player angry about MS acqusition? You use same arguments “nobody care for cloud”, “i don’t care for this game” just because your precious Jim Ryan clearly loosed the fight.
ID@Xbox you/your team as indie studio can make partner with microsoft and distribute your games on xbox platform, i don’t see the problem here. Grounded is a clear example on this. Indie game by indie studio and got huge visibility in gamepass + xcloud. So you argument is not valid about this.
You can publish your game solo, obviously you will have many barriers about trust & safety about that studio, but why not just join in ID@Xbox and let microsoft help you in this?
An thing that sony never will do
For now I have hopes that things will get better.
Microsoft did a good job with Minecraft getting consistent updates over the years and Age of Empires 2 Definitive edition was a huge success compared to the Warcraft3 Reforged disaster that was an insult to the players and the game itself.
Lets go Phill, it’s time to fire someone
Check his historic and you’ll see a lot of ironics posts about phill spencer
well it MIGHT be the future
assuming the future has multi-gigabit wifi available across the world for reasonable pricing