Xbox chief Phil Spencer will visit new Activision, Blizzard, and King employees soon.

Well, it’s official. Microsoft bought Actiblizz.

Today is a good day to play. We have completed the acquisition of Activision Blizzard and are welcoming Activision Blizzard and its businesses to Microsoft Gaming.

Activision, Blizzard, and King publish some of the most played and most beloved franchises in gaming history, from Pitfall to Call of Duty, Warcraft to Overwatch, Candy Crush Saga to Farm Heroes Super Saga. By combining Xbox with Activision Blizzard’s skill, knowledge, and amazing legacy of games, we will bring the joy and community of gaming to even more players around the world.

We are eager to learn from their creativity, exchange insights and best practices, and empower our new colleagues to bring their visions to the widest possible audience. And today, we officially start the work of bringing more groundbreaking games to more players than ever before and across new platforms from mobile to cloud streaming. We also begin the work to make Activision, Blizzard, and King’s muchloved library of games available in Game Pass and other platforms — we’ll have more to share in the coming months.

We couldn’t be more excited that Activision Blizzard employees are our colleagues, co-workers, and teammates. Bobby Kotick has agreed to remain in his role through the end of 2023, reporting directly to me, to ensure a smooth and seamless integration. We look forward to working together as a unified team and we will share more updates on our new organizational structure in the coming months.

I‘d like to give a very special and heartfelt thanks to everyone who helped make this acquisition possible. We couldn’t have accomplished this without your dedication.

Over the coming weeks, I’ll be visiting the Activision, Blizzard, and King offices, along with members of our Gaming Leadership Team. We’ll have the opportunity to welcome our new colleagues at our next virtual all-hands for Xbox employees, and for the greater Microsoft community, we’ll discuss this and more in the November 8 session of the Company Strategy Series.

Together, we can unlock a world of possibilities for players and creators.

Phil

    • djsoren19@yiffit.netEnglish
      243·
      1 year ago

      As long as it starts with Kotick and the other soulless ghouls at the top of Acti-Blizzard, I’m not sure anyone will complain.

      • Neato@kbin.social
        13·
        1 year ago

        Kotick is retiring because he can’t take direction. But will receive hundreds of millions to do so. Why would MS fire anyone else when Activision and King makes money?

      • isles@lemmy.worldEnglish
        15·
        1 year ago

        At what point do we declare that the cyberpunk dystopia is here, because like…

        • fsxylo@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          8·
          1 year ago

          When the apes Elon experiments on survive the implants, instead of going insane and trying to tear them out.

          Until then we’re just in a regular dystopia.

    • Cylusthevirus@kbin.social
      183·
      1 year ago

      Let them eat each other. I’ll be over here playing indie games with actual depth, real care, still getting updates for free years down the line.

      • thoro@lemmy.mlEnglish
        135·
        1 year ago

        The idea there are zero well designed AAA games is such a narrow outlook.

        Indie has its place, but there are experiences that cannot be replicated in the indie sphere at the moment. Consolidation in the AAA space will not make the medium better.

        • Cylusthevirus@kbin.social
          74·
          1 year ago

          Luckily nobody said there were zero well design AAA games, only that I don’t much care if the big studios eat each other. You can always make another studio. It’s happened before, it’ll happen again. This isn’t like car manufacturing where startups face overwhelming costs and regulatory burdens to begin work. Get some capital, hire some good devs, come up with a thoughtful concept, and people will pay for it. Shit, they’ll pay for virtual goods with no expectation of seeing a finished game (coughStarCitizencough).

          but there are experiences that cannot be replicated in the indie sphere at the moment

          The key phrase there being “at the moment.” And frankly the reverse is a lot more true for more enduring reasons. AAA development is entirely too invested in graphical fidelity at the expense of everything else and entirely too beholden to shareholders to take meaningful risks.

          I do not give one tiny, insignificant shit what corpo entertainment goons do to each other or what hats they wear and neither should you. Blizzard as you knew it has been dead for years. This acquisition means nothing. The people that made the Blizzard you knew great can make their own company and probably will if they’re still working. Stop caring about companies and start caring about the human beings that make good games. Remember their names, look at who they work for.

          Game dev has to grow up just like Film did and you can expect the same market driven patterns to emerge. Indies take risks, the big boys iterate on the formulas they establish, and occasionally they stumble into something legitimately good. So it goes.

          But for every big budget film that’s good, you’ll have a dozen Michael Bay style 'splosion and lens flare fests. That’s the expected pattern.

    • Exbando@lemmy.worldEnglish
      112·
      1 year ago

      Sony doesn’t have the kind of money to buy a company comparable to ABK.

      • echo64@lemmy.worldEnglish
        141·
        1 year ago

        sure hope they don’t buy some other company you like then, in this unending purchase spree that we have that benefits literally no one but investors

        • Cylusthevirus@kbin.social
          72·
          1 year ago

          Do people still like the shambling husk that is Blizzard at this point? I’ve been playing their games since Rock N’ Roll Racing and they’re not even close to the same company anymore.

          • echo64@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            1 year ago

            Yes, their games are incredibly popular and sell millions upon millions. Hence why it cost Microsoft 68 billion dollars.

    • tacosanonymous@lemm.eeEnglish
      11·
      1 year ago

      I guess. It’s not like he’s being thrown out on his ass though. Which is more than the actual workers can say. You know this merger will require “consolidation and remove redundancies” or whatever bullshit term they like using.

  • Heratiki@lemmy.mlEnglish
    188·
    1 year ago

    Let’s hope they can revive WoW and Overwatch from the garbage they’ve become.

    • Aielman15@lemmy.worldEnglish
      181·
      1 year ago

      Why do people hope that Microsoft will miraculously revive dormant/mismanaged IPs from their new acquisitions, when they’ve done nothing in the past 10 years but lay to rest and mismanage their own IPs?

      They released the Series X three years ago now and are yet to release a single game on the platform that people care about.

        • Aielman15@lemmy.worldEnglish
          74·
          1 year ago

          The game’s currently sitting on “mixed” reviews on Steam, and the rating is steadily going down (67% at the time of writing, which is an all time low), and that’s on a platform where you can use mods.

          I also literally forgot about it. I guess that’s what happens when you release a game that looks and plays like you gave a prompt to Chat GTP and waited for it to build the entire code and voice all the dialogue for it.

        • LCP@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          I don’t think it’s fair to consider Starfield, since the game was in development before the acquisition completed. The only significant input I would consider is making it Xbox/PC exclusive.

      • Heratiki@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Being that both IP’s are ongoing I’m hoping that going forward they’ll at least increase access to the game. I’m not expecting them to revive it to previous status.

        I’m just hoping with Kotick out things will stop getting worse and a lot of the IP’s end up on GamePass.

        And as far as first party stuff goes Flight Sim, Forza Horizon 5, Halo Infinite all have been fairly well received and are at the very least console exclusives. Minecraft isn’t going the way that a lot of the Java players like but it’s much more accessible and on damn near every device known to man. And that IP is still selling gangbusters even with Legends and Dungeons being not fantastic.

    • simple@lemm.eeOPEnglish
      52·
      1 year ago

      I would really love an “overwatch classic”. Used to love that game so much in the late 2010’s, they just had to drive it to the ground.

      • Heratiki@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        I get the greed behind turning 1 into 2 but how could any of the devel team see what was happening and not absolutely lose their minds. How could anyone see that the game would be better off removing paid content or locking off earnable content. Just blew my mind when it released.

        • simple@lemm.eeOPEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          They did lose their minds, many people left including Jeff Kaplan, the creative lead.

    • tb_@lemmy.worldEnglish
      71·
      1 year ago

      “Look at all the games you love! Please forget we’re a massive corporation which just moved 70 billion dollars closer to a monopoly and would certainly never abuse that position uwu”

    • Boiglenoight@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      That was awesome. I imagine if I worked for Activision Blizzard, that knowledge of Bobby Kotick leaving plus that welcome video would give me some feels.

  • Sanctus@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    The mating of the dinosaurs. This is the same shit that happened to record labels the minute people were able to record quality sounds in their own homes. What happens when all the gaming industry is rolled under some parent organization?

  • CynicalStoic@kbin.social
    41·
    1 year ago

    I’ve seen lots of comments about Microsoft engaging in an acquisition war with Sony but isn’t it really against TenCent?

    • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Why not both. Take away content from Tencent and fight with Sony for gamer attention at the same time.