I have been following Microsofts purchasing process for a long time.
This is generally how they operate.
The way it works when Microsoft purchases a company is usually the following.
1.) At first nothing. Microsoft waits for the hype to die down.
2.) They then slowly begin to take away features.
3.) They then require you to get a Microsoft account to continue to use their product.
(In this case your Blizzard account will eventually be required to be converted to a Microsoft account.)
4.) They then announce the features they took away and now charge you for them, if you want to use them.
Did you really think this all through? If this was the case then why can we still use things like Skype with a Gmail account?
Also Microsoft has a pretty good record of taking âpremium featuresâ of software they purchase and making them baseline. 10 seconds of googling is enough there.
Stop with the panicked arm waving. We get that people like to use these forums to try and twist things as negatively as possible, but you are freaking out over your own wild speculations. That isnât healthy.
The most likely outcome of all this as far as integration goes: Activision, Blizzard, King get to operate as separate studios under the Microsoft Gaming umbrella (like Mojang/Minecraft and Bethesda), while games are somehow incorporated into their Game Pass program. (No idea how WoW would work alongside that thoughâŚ)
Game Pass (MSFTâs subscription service for gaming with 25 million subs) is what theyâre trying to grow.
At some level, yes itâs possible that the sign in for the games joins the rest of what they own⌠but is that really the hill to die on here?
Much more important is what content we get in terms of what the games look likeâŚ
Blizzardâs leadership under Activision has become very stale; theyâve run a lot of franchises into the ground; hard to imagine MSFT being worse in that aspect.
Yeah thatâs the comparison a lot of people make, but I think the more appropriate comparison is Disney+ instead of Netflix.
Disney bought Lucasfilm (Star Wars), Marvel (MCU), and Pixar; and those along with Disney Live Action/Animation are the core anchors of their franchise film/television strategy under Disney+ pumping out tons of franchise content that >100 million people pay for monthly.
MSFT bought Mojang (Minecraft), Bethesda, and now Activision/Blizzard/King, and along with all the other studios they control under XBOX, theyâre basically going to use all those franchises to power Game Pass.
I think the big wigs at MSFT looked at how successful Disney was with that strategy for streaming films/television and figured it made a ton of sense to just copy that for gaming: buy out publishers with powerful franchises and put them all in the same gated community. The ones you canât buy, cut deals and include them anyways like EA (which is a part of Game Pass).
Either way, if MSFT is successful, theyâll probably have the equivalent of what Disney has in terms of the power of the franchises theyâd control.
And while I know that some teams moved to other platforms when they heard the news, the changes Iâm familiar with that have happened have been pretty good ones, such as free private repositories.
Anyway, perhaps there will be some negative changes for some people; I sure donât know, but Iâve been pretty happy with a lot of things from Microsoft over the past few years, and am optimistic about their acquisition of Activision Blizzard and what it may mean for WoW.
LMAO they couldnât even properly integrate or combine mixer accounts with xbox accounts, and they are gonna combine blizz with xbox accounts? At most they will just make new accounts be made through xbox and have blizz accounts as legacy support. You guys donât get how slowly big companies work.
The only âearlyâ crossover thing is likely to be Game Pass adding Activision Blizzard games to their subscription service. Though who knows how WoW would figure into that.
Everything else will take years to figure out given how different the gaming ecosystems are.