Can we take a moment to appreciate the irony of decrying platform lock-in when talking about the company that successfully launched a new gaming console against... Nintendo and Sony?
The fact someone else did something is an absurd justification to do it as well. In a practical level, Xbox is much more locked in than Nintendo, as all Nintendo consoles have PC emulators for it and the devices can be jailbroken.
It's not absurd: it's literally proof of a viable and sustainable business model.
Consoles have always been packaged, standardized, and locked computers. That Nintendo is bad at security isn't proof of any great altruism. It just means they're not good at secure hardware design.
Except they weren't -- until Nintendo came along with their 10NES lockout chip.
Actually Texas Instruments had a go at it with their beige TI-99/4A, but by the time that came out most of the TI-99/4As that would ever be sold were already sold, without the lockout. But it was the NES that turned the locked box into a business model.
Yes. I mean the sub-headline is XboxGamePass is now 25M+ subscribers. Logical next step isn't even games: it's convergence.
Curious we don't see similar consolidation in the Japanese market: Square Enix, Konami, Capcom, Tecmo, Bandai Namco, From. Even Nintendo. All seem attractive targets, no?
That's because the Japanese game companies are more or less in friendly coopetition with each other. Both Namco and Sega run game centers (arcades), which means they're buying each other's games to populate said centers (as well as other manufacturers' games). And then there's Smash Bros., in which many of Nintendo's competitors (including Microsoft -- twice) went to Nintendo and said, "hey, could you feature our characters too?" And then there's Mario & Sonic at the Olympics...
They aren't really consolidated so much as they're interlocked. Many of the largest companies in Japan own stock in all of the other largest companies in Japan. It diversifies their holdings and insulates them from market fluctuations while maintaining their independence.
It's really a bit of everything. Some like Fuji, Hyundai, or Toyota, I believe have been historically diversifying across several different markets.
Sony did expand on some fronts via acquisitions, e.g. Sony Electronics acquiring Konica-Minolta, Sony Electronic Entertainment acquiring several studios, etc.
I'm hoping it just means Diablo 3 released sooner since Microsoft has a mountain of resources.
I'm curious how game development is under the large tech companies like Microsoft. Game development is notoriously recognized as a slave driving industry for the labor force. Massive tech companies, like Microsoft, aren't exactly known as places to slack in the software world, but they also don't seem to have as toxic of a labor culture as the gaming companies who pass mountains of costs to their labor to remain competitive (Amazon perhaps being the exception here).
(Itemization and damage looks very bad in Diablo 4 previews though - damage in hundreds of thousands and "strictly better" items instead of trade offs)
I've had fairly good experiences running Blizzard games under wine over the years. Diablo 3, StarCraft Remastered, and a few others tend to work pretty much perfectly. Based on the versions of Visual Studio and stuff that get pulled in when installing them, I have to wonder if the secret to making a game run well on Wine is just to stick with older versions of the Window-specific libraries rather than the cutting edge.
Well Microsoft just released Age of Empires 4, which turned out surprisingly well, best RTS since Starcraft 2. I'd say chances we're going to see anything SC3 or WC4 related only went up by this. Maybe there will even be a WoW2 finally.
About time other studios get a chance to work with Blizzards IPs, they did well creating all those beautiful universes, but they struggle so much making just one new game every few years.
> Bobby Kotick will continue to serve as CEO of Activision Blizzard, and he and his team will maintain their focus on driving efforts to further strengthen the company’s culture and accelerate business growth.
>Starcraft is not going to be re-born anytime soon
you don't need to make another Starcraft game. you can use that IPs to develop different kind of game like Warcraft is used to make Hearthstone the card game.
Starcraft was just a fantastic game - people have been playing it for decades. Not sure how financially successful it has been (fairly well I would imagine) but it has a legion fan base.
Why they never used Starcraft to compete in the same game-space as Eve Online or Star Citizen is beyond me... though, I think that's just wishful thinking on my part. Love the IP of one and the game play of the other =[
Seems somewhat imaginable, since they'll try to do that with Windows and Xbox obviously. At some point with enough games to support that, PlayStation owners will feel left out and Sony might follow. Who knows...
They're becoming the Disney of gaming, which is scary, but hey, Microsoft gonna Microsoft.