Activision Blizzard

I just saw this.

Microsoft is paying nearly $70 billion for Activision Blizzard, the maker of “Candy Crush’’ and ‘’Call of Duty,’’ as it seeks an edge in the fiercely competitive businesses of mobile gaming and virtual-reality technology.

The all-cash $68.7 billion deal will turn Microsoft, maker of the Xbox gaming system, into one of the world's largest video game companies and help it compete with tech rivals such as Meta, formerly Facebook, in creating immersive virtual worlds for both work and play.

I am not sure if this good or bad. 

I am only slightly skeptical. It has been such a wild couple years for Blizzard, I really can't imagine it being any worse than it has been haha. What gives me hope, Microsoft has been doing some really awesome stuff the last couple years. They've gone much more all in on the idea of PC+Xbox rather than treating them completely separate. They bought GitHub and everyone thought that would be the death of GitHub, but they have been doing amazing stuff with it. They bought Minecraft and everyone was skeptical, but they've done awesome stuff with it. I haven't had much if anything to complain about Microsoft since Windows 8.

I have seen websites buy other websites then they would kill it with the games because they did not want the competition. A few years ago, Candystand.com was bought by Publishers Clearing House then they killed the site and its games. It happens more than we know. 

Also, a few years ago, OMGPOP was bought out by Zynga and the same happened. They deleted the site and games. Money controls everything. 

Yeah, but Microsoft so far haven't shown any indication of doing that.  I think it's more that they want to compete in the online games "library" market, especially for PC games, and this is a good way (and at, no doubt, a good time price wise) for them to do it.  Besides .. I suspect although that is a HUGE amount of money .. it's probably a drop in the ocean to them.  They've essentially got a steady income from lots of sources, so now they can just buy virtually anything they want.

Personally .. "warily optomistic" I think is the best description, for me.  I'd like the idea of WoW (which is the main game I play), being part of the MS subscription service, giving access to a whole load of other games as well - although I'm not sure if they'll do that. 

Blizzard were riding a wave of problems and seemed to be struggling to do anything that made a favourable impact, and they've effectively been "downsizing" for quite some time - which is concerning for a company that is supposed to be churning out content on a pretty regular basis, but only seems to have been churning out disapointment for a lot, recently.  

The amount of realms that are just dying a death - and have been since well before SL came out, the fact that guilds and various aspects of the game/interface relating to guilds, has been pretty much either ignored or made worse over the last few years, the fact that bugs are reported over and over again, but aren't even acknowledged, never mind dealt with .. it's like they can just about keep us "happy" by wallpapering over the cracks .. but that doesn't mean the cracks aren't there.  

They're catering more and more for the casual solo player, than for group play .. which is sad, because that's the whole point of it being a MMORPG.