They were closing studios during this time, Lionhead, and ending partnerships with Insomniac and Remedy. The shareholders and top brass didnt give a shit about PG or TC lol
They were tired of losing money and were done with gaming. The Minecraft buy convinced them otherwise, as it started to make MS serious bank
Because Minecraft is by far the most profitable series they were having, I didn’t even faith on it, tought it would be a fad, 343 and The Coalition never had the same fame as Bungie and Epic as their games never reached the same world breaking success. Playground might have its share of reason to Microsoft keep going on gaming as Forza Horizon is considered the new brand IP for Xbox.
Love or hate it, Minecraft and Forza were the only lasting consistent acclaimed quality franchises, and the former was bringing in billions, Microsoft paid a dime for what would have been worth right now.
I think the point everyone is trying to make was that right before the Mojang acquisition. Microsoft was thinking about closing the Xbox branch. The story about Satya and Phil’s conversation on why Microsoft was in gaming at all and Phil’s pitch to go all in, led to them buying Mojang, and the turn around of Xbox as a brand. I wouldn’t say Mojang itself saved Xbox, but the combination of Phil pushing to go big and that result paying off proved to Satya and Microsoft that gaming could be a pillar of the company.
I remember back when Satya got the office that he was known for very sometimes harsh and strict, cutting off whatever was failing and was like Bill, against buying Nokia.
I would recommend only using a thread like this if you enjoy discussing hypotheticals, or watching the slow descent of a group of people into madness. If anything official happened there would be a new thread for it, and the overall conversion rate of rumours into actual acquisitions has been historically very low.
Do we think Microsoft will go after bigger successful companies or do we think they will go after struggling companies?
They bought Obsidian, InXile and Compulsion Games after they needed more help after they went to Kickstarter.
Obsidian and InXile made many great games before Kickstarter, but sadly they never were as successful as they should have been, so I was just wondering if we think Microsoft will step in to give struggling companies a hand again or not.
The reason why I bring this up is because I’ve been looking at crowd funding sites like Fig and Kickstarter recently and I’ve seen some good looking games that I wish could have gotten funded.
Then I can only imagine what these companies could do if they had a trillion dollar company behind them.
Fifa isn’t casual, it’s popular, but you won’t see most families go on the couch to play an ultra realistic micro transactioned filled football sim.
I know most gamers think like this and they have a hatred for the casual, but casual games have become very rare on anything but mobile. Fifa isn’t exactly pick up and play for most.
The foreigner acquisition rules are basically only brought up by seething Sony fanboys who can’t handle the thought of Microsoft “desecrating” their weeb holy land by acquiring a studio or publisher in Japan.
For independent developers that could benefit from Microsoft’s resources, Harmonix really sticks out to me a lot.
I think they will continue pursuing a publisher though too, due to a variety of reasons (large production pipeline, immediate Game Pass backlog additions, regional advantages, significant IP, etc.)
Like, SEGA or Square could easily add 75+ games to Game Pass after being acquired. And those would be permanent.
. I was just trying to see if I missed any rumours or so on.
