Ms bought Nokia - out of business

Ms bought Skype - useless as Zoom won the Covid era

MS bought Lynda.com- who?

MS bought LinkedIn- does anyone pay $90 a month to use it?

MS bought Danger - the best tactical keyboard mobile phone. DEAD

MS bought Halo vr system a $3509 pos that never got an update

Ms buys stuff , never making stuff.

Wow, I completely forgot about Red Alert. That game was a blast!

Ah, sweet memories of Helm's Deep on WC3 Bnet

I too delusionally hope for warcraft 4 (a good one)

Not only is AoEII doing really well under Microsoft, it's doing so despite taking a couple of goes to get it right in the modern era. Most other companies would have given up when HD edition got a bit of a middling response.

Glad to hear the GSL and pro scene still lives on. 2011-12 SC2 was the first esport that I followed. Plenty of good memories from those days, like the GSL final with the Archon toilet.

I'm glad the age of proxy void rays and queen walks is gone, but there's a lot to be desired from the process. My main grievance is that the community members who form the balance council are under some insane NDA, they're afraid of even discussing what is in the NDA, let alone what they're working on.

You end up with a design by committee with minimal community input, which feeds the cycle back into balance whine shitposts and YT reaction videos. It's arguably better than nothing, but far from healthy.

I miss David Kim.

Giant Grant Games makes a compelling case for why single-player campaign and mod-development experiences are often overlooked but are key for RTS crossover success. And this came out long before the success of BG3. I hold out hope that someone will crack the formula!

https://youtu.be/XehNK7UpZsc

> love RTS games, but they're probably never going to achieve the level of success they have in the past. You can still make them, but like arena shooters, movement shooters, and fighting games, they really are from a different era that modern players struggle to come to terms with

Interesting take. Why do you think that is? They just fallen out of fashion or something else?

Fighters are arguably bigger than they’ve ever been. SF6 alone has made massive inroads in terms of level of entry to the field.

Hell one need only look at the size of this years EVO.

Brood War is incredibly tough for newcomers. Skill-wise, the mid-F rank (barely above the rock bottom) is the equivalent of SC2's low diamond (roughly middle of the playerbase) - people are either this good, or drop out.

If you're looking for a more fair match, and don't mind SC2 being a very different game, you should give it a try. If you can max out on literally anything before 15:00 and a-move your opponent, you will probably get a 50% winrate.

Brood war path finding can be rough to adjust to, even if you played SC2.

I wish star craft had a "scatter" button to space out your units like command and conquer has (its been a decade but I think the button is X). Maybe even some formation options to avoid everyone packing in a tight ball where the move command is issued. AOE is so lethal in SC I think it hurts the gameplay.

Its a safety issue as well. Pro terrans often have wrist issues from splitting their units. With the other races it isn't as crucial, but still an issue.

> The SC2 professional scene is doing really well I think

I could easily claim the opposite. There's very little to no mention of SC2 for Blizzcon '23 as well.

That Starcraft ghost seemed like a cool concept.

Also I wonder why "World of starcraft" never happened. Terran would play like kinda like Planetside, zerg could play like the alien team in Natural Selection, protoss like the predator in the AVP games.

Right. Microsoft is just about the only player left in cloud gaming because Sony, Amazon and Google all tried and gave up in different ways, in part because none of them really found a market nor an audience. I heard Sony is trying again but leasing some cloud servers from Microsoft Azure's white box version of xCloud, ironically.

That last part is also why I think the Ubisoft deal is probably funny. Rumors are Ubi is also leasing much of their cloud gaming from Azure's white box version of xCloud, so Microsoft is likely still going to get paid for people playing Activision things through Ubi's so far unfinished cloud gaming app.

I think the fact Steam / Valve has not jumped into that bandwagon speaks for itself. Its fine when Microsoft does like Xbox Game Pass because they have nothing to lose with it, and they gain people who may want to own some of those games, or who want it for the Microsoft games on the subscription.

I have gigabit fiber and somehow Xbox Cloud Gaming looks like shit. I don’t know how anyone uses it! (On Ethernet, in LA)

I think the technology is about 80% there. To my eye, the graphics and performance are the same as running the game locally.

Provided you have a good internet connection, if you could just run a AAA game off of your crummy computer or tv, why would you buy an expensive graphics card? It is definitely where things are going.

As a gamer, I view the cloud gaming market to be an odd thing to argue over because I don’t care about it all.

It’s the opposite of what I want!

Here's one usecase where I see cloud gaming adding value: esports.

With cloud gaming it's possible to playing field far more, because competitions can now force the same latency by introducing artificial latency.

Cloud gaming also eliminates cheats like wall hacks (or fog of war removal), which is currently possible because the game client and rendering engine all run on a local machine.

15 years is a long time though. I suspect we're not far away from being able to sell a 100$ device, that can AI reconstruct and upscale a super compressed video feed, so that you can stream with lower latencies or even with worse connections.

Nvidia seems to be leading the way here.

But imagine in the cloud, they only needed to render games at 320p, and then they'd stream it compressed at low bitrate using H266 (assuming it's out in a few years). Then your "console", only needs to AI regenerate and upscale the feed, and it ends up looking photo-real or close to it.

You could even explore methods of compression on the video that the AI is best as reconstructing from.

I don't think "cloud gaming" would include it just because it's a multiplayer game with shared servers; my understanding of cloud gaming is that it refers to games being installed only on the server side with the "UI" being streamed to the player rather than the game itself running locally. I could see some potential ambiguity around what constitutes a full local game versus a client streaming a cloud game, but the World of Warcraft installer requires downloading around 100 GB of data files, which seems pretty clearly not a "cloud" game.

That said, I think I remember hearing that Overwatch (or maybe Overwatch 2, I honestly haven't played either and don't have strong enough associations to differentiate between them in what I've read) either is already or is going to be made available to play via Steam, which would be a pretty stark departure from Blizzard's usual insistence on using the Battle.net client for their games, and I wouldn't be surprised if in the long run things get more streamlined between former Blizzard properties and other Microsoft owned games. When the initial deal was announced (back before all of the process around approvals started), I remember a lot of people half-joking that it wouldn't take long for Microsoft to just make WoW subscriptions part of Gamepass, which still doesn't seem _that_ far fetched to me, and I certainly wouldn't be at all surprised if some Blizzard games end up being available through the Microsoft store on Windows. If this does happen, I hope that they don't complete deprecate the "old" ways of launching the games mostly because Blizzard games often work extraordinarily well via Wine, and at least as far as I'm aware, there isn't any super reliable way to install and run games from the Microsoft store on Linux.

Does Ubisoft even have a competitor to Geforce Now?

But presumably they could sell their rights or license them to others, so who knows how this will actually play out.

A few things, and I am likely forgetting others:

Backwards compatibility: It was a mess on the PS3 with different launch models having different levels of compatibility. They later removed this functionality completely on the PS3. The PS4 had no backwards compatibility for PS3 instead you had to purchase (or subscribe) to play games in the cloud, games you may already own.

Compared to Xbox which the Xbox One did not launch with backwards compatibility once the leadership was changed they started a project to bring backwards compatibility to Xbox 360 and OG Xbox games (admittedly on a limited basis but you could stick in your original disks and it worked, no extra charge). This carried over to the Series consoles.

Related to this Sony has re-released their games many times and been able to thanks to the lack of proper backwards compatibility.

The price of the PS3.

The cell processor of the PS3, Sony thinking that devs would bend over backwards to support their architecture.

Paying developers either for exclusive content or for exclusive third party games. The content is the one that really drives me insane because if you buy a game on another platform you are getting less content for the same money.

Blocking cross play with other consoles for a long time and then only allowing it in certain situations (I don't actually know if this has improved yet or not).

There are likely a few others that I can't remember right now but I am about to hop into a meeting. But has Microsoft done some of these things? yes, but before Phil Spensor came in and changed Xbox.

PS2Linux, the way PS3 Linux was a downgrade to PS2Linux, and later removed via firmware update, for example.

This one was pretty bad:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...

I don't think the parent comment is referring to PS5's success, but rather things like their recent significant price increases[0] to their PS Plus service, which is required for multiplayer for a lot of their games.

[0] https://www.ign.com/articles/sony-raises-price-of-playstatio...

The internet discourse around this topic has been awful since it naturally attracts the console wars crowd, and people with an axe to grind against one of the console makers.

Personally, I think the entire "console" industry is just a bunch of predatory anti consumer bullshit, and all 3 of those companies should be forced to end a huge list of harmful business practices.

The part that always confuses me is why the heck does the government keep deciding to protect Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo's monopolies? These 3 companies always seem to get special treatment, such as with the DMCA exception and the recent California right to repair exception for game consoles. This literally only protects 3 nonessential entertainment companies, two of which aren't even from the US. The piracy argument doesn't hold up to scrutiny, so I don't get it. ESA lobbyists are probably really good at their jobs I guess.

i don't think OP meant "don't compete" as in "they're not in the race". i think OP meant that Nintendo just plays their own, slow, long game, focusing on what they want to focus on.

One thing I see as an ancient PC Gamer is that Activision also sits on one of the largest hoards of IPs. Not just "cool" IPs from today's games (a lot of people are mentioning Activision's odd/bad stewardship of Blizzard, of course), but Activision bought a lot of the classic publishers in its history as a massive M&A shop. The legacies of Infocom, Sierra, Knowledge Adventure, Davidson, and many more both well known and almost forgotten to history developers and publishers have all been locked into Activision's forgetful vaults. It's such a huge swath of classic PC games. Some of that catalog Activision eventually allowed onto at least GOG (with GOG allegedly doing a lot of the preservation work to make them run), if not Steam, but there's still so much of gaming history that Activision has either claimed to have lost (No One Lives Forever, as one commonly discussed franchise) or just seems disinterested in the IP they own because they can't figure out how to build mobile games from it.

I don't know if Microsoft will be a better custodian of all that gaming history, but as the company most synonymous with the PC today, maybe they will. (If so, among other possibilities PC Game Pass could get very interestingly different from Xbox Game Pass.)

Came here to say this. Activision has been such a poor steward of Blizzard's properties that I find them largely unplayable. It may be unlikely that Microsoft will course correct away from data-drive, engagement-focus mtx games, but I know Activision never will.

I've argued about this deal on Twitter at length, and the prevailing sentiment of those who favor this acquisition comes down to one thing, and one thing only: getting more AAA games "for free" on Gamepass. Discovering why these people call this an "increase in competition" will be an exercise for future generations of intelligence researchers.

Maybe from an artistic perspective, but not from a financial one. It will inevitably mean gamers will spend more money for less game. They might hide it will with their game renting service and microtransactions, but if this was not the case there would be no reason for them to acquire Activision Blizzard in the first place. They see some way to profit by reducing competition.

Which games has MS shown good stewardship of?

Halo is a shell of what it once was and has snubbed the players with false promises in recent iterations (couch co-op used to be a staple of Halo but they reneged on their promise to include it with the latest).

AFAIK they haven't had any good exclusive IP for Xbox in a while. They've had a few dynamite hits (ex. Sunset Overdrive) but haven't followed up on any that I'm aware of.

I used to love their games, the past decade has been nothing but a slog for them. I'm hoping M$ might be able to turn some of that around.

Like MS has a good track record with improving studios they acquire ... Studios under them seem to succeed despite them not because of them.

> meaning we get these for essentially free.

There is no such thing as "free". We will pay for it later.

I'm more concerned that I won't have access to the games because I don't play on Xbox or Windows.

it should

Then you haven't spent any time on Twitter.

And yet, how come congress keeps getting the same (or same type) of persons elected?

So in the end, the electorate is not choosing a representative that represents them. Or, these niche concerns are not the concerns of the majority of the electorate.

And this upswell can easily be squashed in just over a year's time. We are fortunate that any sort of effort is being made.

> antitrust lobby

you mean protrust lobby :)

Atrophy of.....the FTC

It is the purpose of copyright, explicitly, to incentivize creative work with the promise of monopoly power over its distribution. So it's a bit disingenuous to assert that microsoft is not a monopoly because other game companies exist.

Tech companies have long understood, and in fact may be entirely predicated upon the understanding that you can leverage one monpoly to create another.

If I make a game that can only run on your platform, then you gain a monopoly on platforms that can run that game. These platforms then become not fungible, and therefore de facto monopolies. There is a certain amount of "we haven't tried to port our game to other platforms", which probably shouldn't be an explicit violation of the law, but entering an exclusivity contract with a game studio is, in my opinion, a pretty clear restraint of trade.

Steam basically has a monopoly on PC gaming distro

if nothing is getting meaningfully worse, why is it considered a poorly managed acquisition then? At best they are neutral and is only changing where the profits of said acquisition flows, rather than changing the acquisition.

> I do suspect that Microsoft may have been behind Starfield releasing in its half-baked, dumbed down state though a la “We need it on game pass by X, make it happen!”

In fairness to Microsoft, "half-baked" would be how I describe all of Bethesda's previous releases as well. I don't think Starfield is that far off how Skyrim or Fallout 4 was on release. Starfield's a long shot from where Skyrim and Fallout are now after years of patches and DLC, but I think not far from where they started.

> Regarding at least the Blizzard side of the acquisition, I feel like Microsoft ownership may end up being a good thing for their underused IP. Microsoft has strong incentives to release RTS (StarCraft, Warcraft) games to bolster PC usage for gaming and maybe bring more attention to the Windows Store (IMO forcing minecraft onto the Store was a blunder as the upgrade experience was fucking terrible) if they choose to use it.

Blizzard needs focus, though time will tell if Microsoft can help with that.

Overwatch is a mess right now. The release of Overwatch 2 has gone poorly. The balance is poor. They only do patches like twice a quarter, so it feels like they always have to make very conservative changes because who knows how this change interacts with the 30 other ones in the patch notes. It means heroes that are broken or unplayable tend to stay so for months on end. The pro league is in shambles in the best case, and dead in the worst and most likely. They've been losing players. PvE never really launched, and now they're charging extra for the shitty scraps that came out of it.

Diablo 4 is basically dead. 5 million players on launch, 300k last month. They're down to ~5% of the players they started with a year after launch. The core gameplay was not fun, and I can't believe no one noticed it forever ago.

WoW is WoW, but it's stale. The most exciting thing they've done in ages was re-releasing old versions of the game. They're basically just waiting to get upended by something actually innovative.

At this point, I love Blizzard's characters and worlds, but I think their games are D tier. They have the half-finished feel of a Bethesda game, but they don't have any of the fun. They don't resemble the same Blizzard that originally released SC2 and WoW.

> They haven’t owned Bethesda for very long so I think it’s fair that they haven’t released a F:NV successor yet.

Word on the street is that the principals at the top of Obsidian and Bethesda still hate each other, Microsoft keeps them at arms distance, and Obsidian isn't in a rush to do a new Fallout game even if "Daddy Microsoft" forced Bethesda to share its toys with the other studios (just like "Daddy Interplay" used to do, which is part of what led to the mess of Obsidian, inXile, and Bethesda all having crazy drama with each other before Microsoft became the new Interplay of RPG company owners).

I think that Obsidian's Outer Worlds was a very good F:NV successor. It had most of the hallmarks of the Fallout universe, just tweaked with a bit more space sci-fi and a weirder sense of humor. One of the interesting things about Starfield to me is how often I'm comparing it to Outer Worlds (and how often it feels like Outer Worlds was the better more coherent story/RPG in a similar way to F:NV fans like to compare Fallout 3/4 on either side of F:NV).

> I do suspect that Microsoft may have been behind Starfield releasing in its half-baked, dumbed down state though a la “We need it on game pass by X, make it happen!”

The rumor mill suggests the opposite is true. Bethesda intended to ship the game over a year ago and Microsoft delayed it to make sure it wasn't the next No Man's Sky or Cyberpunk.

> I do suspect that Microsoft may have been behind Starfield releasing in its half-baked, dumbed down state

Bethesda has been consistently simplifying their games since Morrowind and I don't think they've ever had smooth launch.

While it's true Microsoft rushes many releases, I don't think they're entirely to blame in this case

Bethesda has been synonymous with janky game launches for decades. They practically invented it.

Forget Starfield, anyone remember the disastrous Redfall release earlier this year?

Rare still exists and I think seems to be at the top of their game.

Nuts & Bolts was a good Banjo game and close enough to "actual" for me. Sure, all the "building" mechanics were silly, but all the classic platforming was still there and the building mechanics just added more collectathons to series infatuated with collectathons. That felt very true to Banjo-Kazooie to me.

Rare's love affair with Kinect and building a lot of Kinect games would have never been questioned if it was a love affair with the Wii in the same time.

Similarly, overlooked treasures like Kameo and Viva Pinata would probably have tons of fans if they had released on Nintendo platforms.

Rare Replay reminded me that Rare has done three big pirate games in their history plus one of the most beloved sections of Banjo-Kazooie is pirate themed, so Sea of Thieves is just about the "Most Rare" that Rare has ever been. It's a delightful game and deserves the following that it has now. Hopefully "Safer Seas" in December will open up Sea of Thieves for more children and family play and for more players that can't yet see past the open-PvP to all the delightful Rare details and treasures inside.

I thought this article (https://www.eurogamer.net/who-killed-rare) was pretty insightful.

Starfield was developed by Bethesda Game Studios. Fallout: New Vegas was developed by Obsidian Entertainment and published by Bethesda Softworks.

> I mean - didn't the team that would work on that launch Starfield in the last month?

Yep. Although one could argue there are are other studios who could be tapped to make a sequel.

Pentiment is a masterpiece.

> Microsoft will likely just let them keep operating as they do now, providing money and reaping any profits.

Yeah, it's not like Microsoft ever bought a game studio that was making a highly-anticipated game, then made them release it as an XBox / PC Exclusive or anything.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_(franchise)

https://www.halopedia.org/Halo:_Combat_Evolved_for_Macintosh

No they want to buy a monopoly since they couldn’t earn one.

Until enshittification. And then they’ll be hollowed out.

That they don't already think gamers are ripe for it shows how bad they are at making games people want to buy/play.

They already owned those when they bought Zenimax, who bought id (except for the Trek games).

I'd say that Windows and Office are the two areas that Satya didn't really touch or influence in much of any way and mostly let continue on autopilot as he focused on every other area of Microsoft.