Microsofts BlizzCon is coming up ! What do you expect to see ? (3rd Nov)

Gaming
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At the very least I expect to see heavy Microsoft marketing and some announcements for GamePass drops of back catalogue titles.

I hope to see some additional footage of the blizzard survival game and hopefully it is confirmed as an Xbox platform exclusive.

Besides that, I would love to see announcement of Diablo immortal and hearthstone console ports, and my dream would be a StarCraft 3 teaser trailer.

Edit: realistically I’d expect to also see a diablo 4 expansion trailer. I think they mentioned they wanted an expansion every year.

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Project Odyssey. Xbox exclusive.

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I don’t think you’ll be seeing it there unless it’s multiplatform. I would think they want to see where the FTC case in December is going, no use giving them ammo. Also, they would probably want to reduce the anti ABK rhetoric and focus more on XGS now that Zenimax has got its shine.

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Do you really think they will hold off due to the ftc? Rest of the world approved

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I think so, they wont want to give them ANYTHING to work with. But honestly probably just pure logistics, things will take time with the size of these two teams (Blizzcon planning would have started 6 months ago?).

Going to be a lot of meetings…

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6

100 percent. Besides if they want to get Sega or any other publisher they will want to wait and see the landscape. I won’t be surprised if after all this the FTC comes out demanding the games be released on Playstation as a new concession.

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7

FTC unfortunately can’t start demanding small concessions, that ship sailed when they lost the injunction.

They need/want complete unwinding of the transaction.

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8

Yeah true. Though they can negotiate a settlement with MS to stop all their legal action and I guess it’s possible that is what they want. To win a concession of some sort that they can parade round with.

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9

Regulators do theoretically have the powers to unwind a merger many years after it’s completion.

It’s much harder after the fact but I don’t think Microsoft will want to do anything to help the FTC’s case in December.

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Phil is going to meet with Blizzard next week, so it will be interesting if there’s any alternative coming out of it to change plan for Blizzcon.

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FTC can do nothing without a federal judge approval. The level of persuasion post-merger is way higher than six months ago.

Also, I reiterate that the move of FTC to put their own administrative judge from decision to consultative position has probably ruined all the support they had from the judge community.

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12

Who knows. Judges probably knew about this game during all trials and nobody talked about it as a problematic important licence.

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13

I’m not expecting much, if anything at all in terms of Xbox synergy/announcements but we will see

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14

Something tells me Phil might show up.

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They are not worried about that case.

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16

“Let them try” is basically how Microsoft sees them today.

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Maybe not but caution is still something. Microsoft loves the good image thing so I don’t think they want to further enrage the FTC.

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Maybe not but Microsoft loves the good image and wouldn’t mind working out a deal that mollifies the FTC as I would think they’d want to get all the big acquisitions done quickly.

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The FTC deserves to be treated with scorn at this point over their outrageous behavior. There is ZERO chance that any Federal court is going to take the almost unprecedented step of unwinding a merger in a case where the merger was vertical and has no basis in logic or facts to support such a ridiculous move. The deal is closed and time to move on as Xbox has done with the announcement, nothing to see here with the FTC blind nonsense.

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ignoring the fact that the FTC can try to break up the merger indefinitely so (however futile it may be) so MS will never be in the 100% clear, making that survival game exclusive (if they choose to) wouldn’t even go against anything phil or any of the the other executives said in the previous FTC trials.

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