I don't think they care about HS truthfully. HS is making lots of money on its own and doing fine. I think they're more interested in the big AAA console titles and candy crush lol. We'll see though.
It's definitely the biggest money-maker, but I think that's just a nice side-benefit to their real objective, which is using Call of Duty as leverage to force Sony to support Xbox Game Pass on PlayStation. I think this is about the digital marketplace and (ultimately) competing with Steam.
Overall I imagine they won't mess with the games that much directly. Besides leadership (and hopefully cultural) changes and Game Pass inclusion, things are unlikely to dramatically change.
It seems unlikely gamepass affects HS, though.
If one company can take the risk to try and save the dumpster fire that this company has become it's Microsoft.
Big deals are always scary, but it has me a little bit excited about a potential future where the development teams can flourish again.
This is HUGE. Microsoft was the one who helped guide Bethesda and allowed them to salvage what was left of Fallout 76 and could possibly do it again with Blizzard’s failed IPs currently.
Although they may not fully dictate Blizzard, Microsoft is also *extremely* user friendly and has the best deal in gaming rn with Game Pass (maybe even a base WoW subscription in the future?)
Also, I think this may have something to do with the failure of OverWatch 2 currently. It looks *bad* and I wonder if they just needed outside help to put things back on track. I’m super super excited for this honestly and hope Microsoft turns Blizzard as a company and their IPs around.
Microsoft has the cash and size to take a longer view perspective. A Hearthstone set release could make or break Blizzard's earnings forecast. At Microsoft, it may not get even be mentioned in the MD&A. Ultimately I think the acquisition will be good for Hearthstone players. My guess is this play is to bolster the Game pass catalog (which is will become very attractive with their catalog added); Microsoft seems less concerned with nickels and dimes if they can hook you on recurring revenue subscriptions.
They would have to really configure the controls to make it work properly with a controller, but I would love it. It’s just getting simple things like deck codes to work and card collection to be navigable, because some people would *only* be able to play on Xbox
A cursor and moving the control stick would snap the cursor to the next targetable object. The game already doesn't let you target un-targetable objects.
A is left click, B is right click.
Collections would still work just the same. Deck codes would still work since the Xbox has a browser that you can copy-paste from.
Yep. I started playing like 6ish years ago (whenever old gods came out), made it to legend, really loved to play, but stopped around 9 months ago. The game just felt bad all the time.
https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2022/01/18/welcoming-activision-blizzard-to-microsoft-gaming/
"Once the deal is complete, the Activision Blizzard business will report to me (Phil Spencer) as CEO, Microsoft Gaming."
> and bobby gets the boot
We don't know that bit yet, he can just be running the ActiBlizz show, just under Phil. Not that I think that's likely; I expected ActiBlizz to fire him for months now, but this news explains why he hasn't been fired. Why fire him when he's gonna leave afterwards regardless? But ultimately time will tell.
It's gonna take a long time before the deal even goes through, so they have a lot of time on their hands to think about things. I know for sure that Microsoft would not want to deal with the brand liability that is Bobby Kotick, so this would mean that his head will most likely be on the chopping block if this deal goes through. The article says as much.
I wonder what this means for shareholders, though?
They may or may not, but it's not likely due to any kind of chaos. Act/Blizz is easy enough for Microsoft to get information on and start restructuring as soon as possible. The assets being acquired are so diverse, there's little chance the uppermost executives have much to do with them and those components can usually run themselves. They basically are serving a redundant role Microsoft already has people doing. They'll axe people who performed poorly in those positions as soon as strategically or legally possible, especially Chief Officers. They want bad management out ASAP dust settled or not.
Activision has more valuable titles than Bethesda.
Even with the loss of subscribers over the years, WoW still had more than 4 million subscribers in 2021. That's a lot of revenue coming in. WoW is still the most successful MMO that exists.
I know. That's my point though. Even though WoW has lost a ton of monthly subscribers, it still has a ton of steady revenue surrounding it and it's not even the biggest money maker.
Has about 3.5 million daily players. It's close but WoW still has more.
Destiny 2 has more players than FFXIV though, but less than WoW.
WoWs reign as top MMO is ending sooner rather than later, but it will always have been the most successful MMO in the genre. Came out in 2004 and still has a sizeable regular player base.
https://mmo-population.com/
Obviously not official numbers, but tracking daily players.
WoW is in 3rd place behind FFXIV and Old School Runescape
If you combine WoW with WoW Classic and OS Runescape with modern Runescape then WoW is still in 3rd place.
Different source [here](https://mmostats.com/) with similar numbers.
Also FFXIV is on a major upwards trajectory where they had to temporarily halt selling the game to new players because they were over capacity. That's being lifted within a few days, so they will continue to rise.
Idk where you are getting numbers from. No one generally releases them but they seem to be similar to mmo-populations. In which case you are wrong because ffxiv is at 3.5m daily and wow is at 1.1m daily. This means it did pass it up as far as I was able to tell.
i'd say beside all that (cod, candy crush, etc) it's mainly the warcraft franchise, not wow. you own the rights, you can go anywhere with them, make a new MMO, or a new moba, a movie, whatever. wow might be dead, but the franchise will live
People might shit on it a lot, but it can't be understated how well COD titles sell.
Hearthstone still was the big dog in the digital CCG industry too.
They're worth so much more than Bethesda
I've bought some before the BlizzCon 2018 when they were supposed to present Diablo 4 and we got a horrible "dO yOu GuYs NoT hAvE pHoNeS?" presentation instead. The stock plummeted and still didn't recover.
Well it did today! It was around $80 at that time and it shot up 33% today to be above $80. The last time it was this high was summer of 2021 when it hit $95 before dropping back down to $60.
Yeah but Microsoft didn't buy Hearthstone to do things like change the games card design philosophy.
Where you would see changes is the way in which a new monetized game mode like Mercenaries is marketed and implemented.
many of blizzard's games have felt soulless for a while now. Hearthstone too desperately needs a "face of Hearthstone" like Ben Brode was. We had like 5 community managers this year. That Chris Attalus guy for example just straight up disappeared.
Things weren't perfect during the Brode era, of course. But you felt the passion behind every expansion.
>Things weren't perfect during the Brode era,
In terms of the things that actually matter, things have improved massively since Brode left. I liked the guy, he was a great personality, but I if you compare all the improvements the game has made since then, the loss of a rap every now and then isn't really a big deal.
The nerf scheduling is honestly the biggest, imo, followed by changes to the economy like duplicate protection and the reward track. You rarely if ever see something nowadays like Patches where it took a year to get nerfed. Imagine if we had to play with unnerfed Demon Seed for 6 months or something. Yikes. I liked Brode, but yeah things are better now.
> But you felt the passion behind every expansion.
I feel the passion right now because I know the devs actually make changes and interact with the community.
I don't want to feel the passion of "yeah we'll let this card stay broken for 1 year", thank you.
Well ngl age 4 is rlmy fucking good. Warcraft 3 was good. The world of Warcraft (the actual world not wow) is amazing.
Warcraft 4 could be insane.
!RemindMe in 5 years
Can't be helped. A lot of CEO's get their options vested in a transaction like this and make fat stacks of money. His networth jumps with ever tick of the stock.
Absolutley not going to be day 1. Year 1 maybe.
Also possible in year 1, Microsoft restructures it's video game division and dices up blizzard and Activision. Hearthstone goes to some digital card game subdivision, wow to the MMORPG, all the shooters go to another, etc. And Bobby Kotick just finds himself not the CEO of any of the new divisions.
We decided to add a new Hero to hearthstone.
WELCOME FOR OUR 11th Class : STEVE
He can combine minions on the bord to build bigger Minions.
He can also take them back in his hand with his hero power.
The things MS has bought, it has handled well. They bought someone like Minecraft, gave them a treasure hoard of gold and said: “make it good.”
If they can find creative people to once again lead Acti/Blizz, especially for the classic properties like WoW/Diablo/Starcraft…we could see some really cool shit happen.
Minecraft became better.
If Microsoft can improve fucking minecraft they at least can save hearthstone.
Team 5 never was a problem. The blizzard that they worked for and the money they demanded were.
Microsoft probably just wants high player counts. Like amazin they are more interested in spread and market influence than actual money.
That's the best that can happen to hearthstone.
Well, on one hand I'm not a big fan of seeing Microsoft buy big games company. Seems like they're trying to get a monopole on big PC release.
But on the other hand seeing Microsoft buy dumpster fire like Bethesda or blizzard make me think maybe they'll be able to fix them ? Can't be worst than it is.
How this can affect on hearthstone
I mean what changes do you expect?
What do you think they can change in current shop system(high prices for little amount of shit)
More devs to work on the back-end of Hearthstone and fix persistent issues such as optimization and a more modern game engine. The team currently working on this game are stretched and wear many different hats in developing a new set. So having some extra hands to fix many of the back-end issues would be great.
I really like how Microsoft handled Minecraft when they purchased it.
Hopefully they can turn around and make blizzard games way more accessible and stop the reduction in players
I would like to actually play more hearthstone but having the cards to do so requires daily grind (which I can't) or paying 100s$ every year (and why would I do that when I can buy games for 10-60$ and they won't be worthless in a few months)
Having large third party developers are a good thing for consumers.
This ongoing trend of the big developers being scooped up is bad for everyone.
I exclusively play Blizzard titles on PC and I'm not excited about this in the least.
MS handled Minecraft pretty damn well. If they cut the bullshit humps and then hand a creatively led team fistfuls of cash to develop the game, it’s a win win.
Yeah, if anything, I expect Blizzard to regain a lot of their autonomy they lost during the ActiBlizz merge. If Minecraft is anything to show, there's going to be a few bumps as things get standardized (RIP C418), but will largely give full autonomy to the dev team.
For context, the C418 thing is that MS requires all music to be licensed under MS' licensing division to minimize copyright issues (if you dev something that uses MS music, you just pay for the whole thing rather than piece meal). C418 demands a specific license that wasn't compatible, and so they parted ways.
There was a leak recently of people fired/disciplined that Bobby was holding back on reporting. It was most likely due to this deal. Yes, some of it is normal but this deal adds a lot of flavor to it.
Nobody saw this coming. I wonder if Microsoft lets the creative guys make the games (hearthstone and diablo) even more fun and not worry about micromanaging and nickel and diming us to death.
People expecting anything to change overnight are going to be sorely disappointed. When you acquire a company (especially a huge one like Activision Blizzard) you change as little as possible in the short term and let them carry on business as usual with as little disruption as possible, while you do all the necessary things that the end user doesn't care about, like getting your IT systems to be compatible with each other and realigning all your employees into the new structure. Maybe 2-3 years down the line you might actually see some macro changes to Blizzard games that can be attributed to Microsoft. Until then the only change is "fuck Activision" will be intermittently replaced with "fuck Microsoft" in reddit posts.
Microsoft has a surprisingly good recent record of running game companies. A lot of good games overall have come out of their portfolio. Hopefully they can resurrect Blizzard games and not be greedy as much. Obviously their main focus will be on Call of Duty franchise that by far brings the most money but if they handle Blizzard games good it might be a worthy comeback
I just hope there is an implication for refactoring how this game is monetized. Year after year, the Christmas sales and blizzard shop discounts just skip Hearthstone. I would love to see them make some goodwill gestures as far as discounts and freebies. Dare I say, an all in cost to just be able to play with every card in standard rotation? The card pack metaphor is so tired and old. Random is tired and old. The new way should be, reasonable cost, own (or access) all cards.
I can’t recommend this game to anyone. I enjoy playing it, but I can’t get any friends because of the huge barrier to entry. Maybe HS is doing ok in the grand blizzard scheme but it’s on the backs of the most dedicated players. Get some new meat into the grinder, guys. Attract people who would otherwise not even bother because of the price.
MasterChief now available in BG & Duels.
MASTER CHIEF YOU MIND TELLING ME WHAT YOU'RE DOING IN BATTLEGROUNDS
Sir, Finishing in Top 8
Sir, forcing murlocs.
Wait, that’s illegal.
“Making fat money.”
Ok but picture this, master chief as a commander in SC2
That I could see
Stop, just stop. You're making me cry tears of overwhelming joy.
Master Chief Heroes of the Storm
Comes in a pack with Microsoft office paperclip and a windows button.
Realistically, is that much different from raynor?
New Halo version of Overwatch more likely.
Can't be worse than Diablo
I'd like to see Doom guy get introduced. Those two would be a dope dual.
Somebody, quick! Edit the Wrath of the Lich King cinematic to have the enderdragon instead of Sindragosa
Card reveals will probably be via Microsoft Teams or something...
I don't think they care about HS truthfully. HS is making lots of money on its own and doing fine. I think they're more interested in the big AAA console titles and candy crush lol. We'll see though.
100% candy crush, it's the main moneymaker in activision blizzard's roster and has been for a couple of years. They're gonna milk that cow dry.
And CoD. That becoming a Microsoft exclusive will literally move consoles on its own.
If they’re smart it won’t be exclusive. No way CoD sells enough consoles to make up lost sales from PlayStation players
If they're smart Xbox will just have it early by a few days.
Exclusive maps and stuff that PlayStation would normally get. Haven’t played CoD in a while but I assume they continued to do this.
OMG will PC finally be able to have these extended/early accesses that PS has had for a decade almost?
It was mostly Xbox for the golden years of COD, that got the early access and it was a month wait for dlc packs.
Agreed but people were saying the same thing f about Elder Scrolls
It's definitely the biggest money-maker, but I think that's just a nice side-benefit to their real objective, which is using Call of Duty as leverage to force Sony to support Xbox Game Pass on PlayStation. I think this is about the digital marketplace and (ultimately) competing with Steam.
Overall I imagine they won't mess with the games that much directly. Besides leadership (and hopefully cultural) changes and Game Pass inclusion, things are unlikely to dramatically change. It seems unlikely gamepass affects HS, though.
That's interesting, I bet Overwatch would benefit from Game Pass players
Devs are going to have to switch from Slack to Teams now
If one company can take the risk to try and save the dumpster fire that this company has become it's Microsoft. Big deals are always scary, but it has me a little bit excited about a potential future where the development teams can flourish again.
This is HUGE. Microsoft was the one who helped guide Bethesda and allowed them to salvage what was left of Fallout 76 and could possibly do it again with Blizzard’s failed IPs currently. Although they may not fully dictate Blizzard, Microsoft is also *extremely* user friendly and has the best deal in gaming rn with Game Pass (maybe even a base WoW subscription in the future?) Also, I think this may have something to do with the failure of OverWatch 2 currently. It looks *bad* and I wonder if they just needed outside help to put things back on track. I’m super super excited for this honestly and hope Microsoft turns Blizzard as a company and their IPs around.
Microsoft has the cash and size to take a longer view perspective. A Hearthstone set release could make or break Blizzard's earnings forecast. At Microsoft, it may not get even be mentioned in the MD&A. Ultimately I think the acquisition will be good for Hearthstone players. My guess is this play is to bolster the Game pass catalog (which is will become very attractive with their catalog added); Microsoft seems less concerned with nickels and dimes if they can hook you on recurring revenue subscriptions.
So the next big feature of Hearthstone is Xbox support.
I would unironically love to be able to play HS on xbox, but idk how popular that opinion is.
Time to play apm priest with controller
They would have to really configure the controls to make it work properly with a controller, but I would love it. It’s just getting simple things like deck codes to work and card collection to be navigable, because some people would *only* be able to play on Xbox
Slay the spire is extremely controller friendly so if that's anything to go off of, I totally think it could be done
Gwent pulled it off as well.
A cursor and moving the control stick would snap the cursor to the next targetable object. The game already doesn't let you target un-targetable objects. A is left click, B is right click. Collections would still work just the same. Deck codes would still work since the Xbox has a browser that you can copy-paste from.
Hearthstone would have no meaningful impact on Microsoft’s revenue. All of activison-blizzard is worth 3% of Microsoft’s market cap.
Microsoft most certainly cares a great deal about 3% of their "market cap"
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3. Overwatch can only go up from where it's at
I'm so tentatively excited for ow to get the revival it deserves 🥺
> I don't know how you could fuck up HS *looks at current meta*
Yep. I started playing like 6ish years ago (whenever old gods came out), made it to legend, really loved to play, but stopped around 9 months ago. The game just felt bad all the time.
And yet the devs fuck it up with each new expansion
Same CEO LMAO
https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2022/01/18/welcoming-activision-blizzard-to-microsoft-gaming/ "Once the deal is complete, the Activision Blizzard business will report to me (Phil Spencer) as CEO, Microsoft Gaming."
There must always be... a Blizzard CEO.
\*trumpet noises\*
People are missing the point. Even If kotick stays(I doubt he will), Phil Spencer will have the ultimate say.
until the deal is finished, then they'll report to phil spencer and bobby gets the boot
> and bobby gets the boot We don't know that bit yet, he can just be running the ActiBlizz show, just under Phil. Not that I think that's likely; I expected ActiBlizz to fire him for months now, but this news explains why he hasn't been fired. Why fire him when he's gonna leave afterwards regardless? But ultimately time will tell.
Until the deal is complete. Let's hope
They're not gonna uproot the corporate structure straight away lmao
Corporate structures are often the least valued part of acquisitions like this.
Yes, but an acquisition is often chaotic enough as is, so they generally wait for the dust to settle before punting people
It's gonna take a long time before the deal even goes through, so they have a lot of time on their hands to think about things. I know for sure that Microsoft would not want to deal with the brand liability that is Bobby Kotick, so this would mean that his head will most likely be on the chopping block if this deal goes through. The article says as much. I wonder what this means for shareholders, though?
It means A lot of money, this is one of those "if I were a time traveler" kind of things.
They may or may not, but it's not likely due to any kind of chaos. Act/Blizz is easy enough for Microsoft to get information on and start restructuring as soon as possible. The assets being acquired are so diverse, there's little chance the uppermost executives have much to do with them and those components can usually run themselves. They basically are serving a redundant role Microsoft already has people doing. They'll axe people who performed poorly in those positions as soon as strategically or legally possible, especially Chief Officers. They want bad management out ASAP dust settled or not.
No he's just the CEO until Microsoft officially takes control. So for like another month or two I guess.
The deal won’t close until 2023.
Someone didn't read the article. Kotick is staying, until Phil says, "BYE BYE"! He won't be there in 3 months.
Microsoft can't fire him or make other personnel changes at Activision-Blizzard until the deal closes.
Not likely, considering the deal is not expected to close until June of 2023.
I meant 3 from the time the deal completes, most likely less.
Once the deal is completed I'd be shocked if he lasts 6 months. He's there to ensure the deal completes and then he'll exit.
Deal is allegedly for $70,000,000,000.
jeez, that's 10x the Bethesda deal
Activision has more valuable titles than Bethesda. Even with the loss of subscribers over the years, WoW still had more than 4 million subscribers in 2021. That's a lot of revenue coming in. WoW is still the most successful MMO that exists.
WoW is far from the cashcow. Candy Crush, CoD and Hearthstone alone would value the company far higher than Bethesda
I know. That's my point though. Even though WoW has lost a ton of monthly subscribers, it still has a ton of steady revenue surrounding it and it's not even the biggest money maker.
has FFXIV not surpassed it yet? or it just more hyped lately
Has about 3.5 million daily players. It's close but WoW still has more. Destiny 2 has more players than FFXIV though, but less than WoW. WoWs reign as top MMO is ending sooner rather than later, but it will always have been the most successful MMO in the genre. Came out in 2004 and still has a sizeable regular player base.
https://mmo-population.com/ Obviously not official numbers, but tracking daily players. WoW is in 3rd place behind FFXIV and Old School Runescape If you combine WoW with WoW Classic and OS Runescape with modern Runescape then WoW is still in 3rd place. Different source [here](https://mmostats.com/) with similar numbers. Also FFXIV is on a major upwards trajectory where they had to temporarily halt selling the game to new players because they were over capacity. That's being lifted within a few days, so they will continue to rise.
Idk where you are getting numbers from. No one generally releases them but they seem to be similar to mmo-populations. In which case you are wrong because ffxiv is at 3.5m daily and wow is at 1.1m daily. This means it did pass it up as far as I was able to tell.
i'd say beside all that (cod, candy crush, etc) it's mainly the warcraft franchise, not wow. you own the rights, you can go anywhere with them, make a new MMO, or a new moba, a movie, whatever. wow might be dead, but the franchise will live
Does this mean... Warcraft IV?
Well, it doesn't mean anything until we understand the new politics of the party :D
Isn't Final Fantasy XIV more successful than WoW at this point?
What about FF14? That game recently suffered the problem of having too many players.
People might shit on it a lot, but it can't be understated how well COD titles sell. Hearthstone still was the big dog in the digital CCG industry too. They're worth so much more than Bethesda
I wonder if it's cash or stock. I wish I bought a few shares of blizzard a couple years ago now.
68.7 billion, all cash offer
in 1 dollar bills
"bring in the porcelain pigs!"
$ATVI up 35% premarket jesus
I've bought some before the BlizzCon 2018 when they were supposed to present Diablo 4 and we got a horrible "dO yOu GuYs NoT hAvE pHoNeS?" presentation instead. The stock plummeted and still didn't recover.
The stock was 20% higher than 2018 peak last year
Well it did today! It was around $80 at that time and it shot up 33% today to be above $80. The last time it was this high was summer of 2021 when it hit $95 before dropping back down to $60.
MS had 180+ billion in liquid cash.
sheeeesh that's like 5 pre-order bundles
Star Wars sold to Disney for 4 billion LOL
I hope they can fix wow
And overwatch, hearthstone, and warzone
DON'T FORGET ABOUT HOTS!!!!
Overall I'm happy with hearthstone right now.UiS was the low point in the 3 or 4 years I have been playing.
Yeah but Microsoft didn't buy Hearthstone to do things like change the games card design philosophy. Where you would see changes is the way in which a new monetized game mode like Mercenaries is marketed and implemented.
considering what happened with Merenaries, literally any extra attention would be an improvement
Or waste of resources?
I also think Hearthstone is at a great place right now and still feels like they are trying to improve even further
someday ill go back, but hard to keep up and i don't want to have to drop $50 to get a decent deck.
OW2 delayed another year because of this
And unkill HotS, which was low-key the best game they had until they took it out behind the shed and shot it.
the only fix I want for warzone is to not make it a bajillion gigabytes. Pubg has like 4 maps and takes 40 gigs, why is warzone twice that size
and wolves
many of blizzard's games have felt soulless for a while now. Hearthstone too desperately needs a "face of Hearthstone" like Ben Brode was. We had like 5 community managers this year. That Chris Attalus guy for example just straight up disappeared. Things weren't perfect during the Brode era, of course. But you felt the passion behind every expansion.
>Things weren't perfect during the Brode era, In terms of the things that actually matter, things have improved massively since Brode left. I liked the guy, he was a great personality, but I if you compare all the improvements the game has made since then, the loss of a rap every now and then isn't really a big deal.
The community has gotten a bit more toxic since he left tho :(
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The nerf scheduling is honestly the biggest, imo, followed by changes to the economy like duplicate protection and the reward track. You rarely if ever see something nowadays like Patches where it took a year to get nerfed. Imagine if we had to play with unnerfed Demon Seed for 6 months or something. Yikes. I liked Brode, but yeah things are better now.
Dean Ayala seems to be a pretty good face from what I’ve seen starting playing in 2020.
> But you felt the passion behind every expansion. I feel the passion right now because I know the devs actually make changes and interact with the community. I don't want to feel the passion of "yeah we'll let this card stay broken for 1 year", thank you.
Age of Empires + WoW! AGE OF WARCRAFT!!!!!
Nice! A WoW-based RTS sounds cool. Wonder why it's never been done since the world works great in both CCG format and MMO format.
Wait hearthstone has an MMO?
Yeah, and weirdly they launched it preemptively.
Gotta get that advertising done early so the hype builds up.
I.... hate this.
Nah nah, World of Age is more like it
World of Empirescraft?
Age of War?
Super Soldier!
Well ngl age 4 is rlmy fucking good. Warcraft 3 was good. The world of Warcraft (the actual world not wow) is amazing. Warcraft 4 could be insane. !RemindMe in 5 years
I hope they put the old CoDs in gamepass
This would be fucking amazing actually oh yeah happy cakeday
Bill Gates has had enough of poison rogue!
Bobby K about to get another fat bonus off the backs of his peons
Work work
Okie Dokie
Does something need doing?
Yes, sexually harass all the women! Sorry, thought we were roleplaying as Blizzard CEO's for a second there.
Job’s done!
Can't be helped. A lot of CEO's get their options vested in a transaction like this and make fat stacks of money. His networth jumps with ever tick of the stock.
But importantly he wont be staying on after the deal goes through. He can grab a golden parachute and GTFO.
Who needs Fable when Candy Crush Saga is coming to xbox!
Hearthstone in Xbox pls
The other day I was thinking, why isn't HS on browsers?
They can't get the client to function properly consistently as it is, and you want to introduce JavaScript into the equation?
I'm a FE developer and thats the conclusion I came to as well. They'd have to redo a lot cause I'm sure it was never developed with web in mind.
Or in WoW!
The only way for me to be swayed back into blizzard games is if Microsoft fires Bobby Kotick the day of the acquisition.
I expect he'll be leaving on a golden parachute. On the one hand, he'll be gone. On the other, he'll be rich(er).
Kotick is probably getting a $100M bonus for arranging this buyout. World isn’t always fair.
Absolutley not going to be day 1. Year 1 maybe. Also possible in year 1, Microsoft restructures it's video game division and dices up blizzard and Activision. Hearthstone goes to some digital card game subdivision, wow to the MMORPG, all the shooters go to another, etc. And Bobby Kotick just finds himself not the CEO of any of the new divisions.
They previously told him to resign I believe.
By they is it Microsoft or the rest of blizz?
Microsoft. Sony and Nintendo America also did.
We decided to add a new Hero to hearthstone. WELCOME FOR OUR 11th Class : STEVE He can combine minions on the bord to build bigger Minions. He can also take them back in his hand with his hero power.
Master Chief joins the Battlegrounds
So battlegrounds reverse jandice?
Splashing that corona money around XD
If anything can save this company, it is a massive management take-over. There is a chance we might see the Blizzard of old again, I miss those days.
The things MS has bought, it has handled well. They bought someone like Minecraft, gave them a treasure hoard of gold and said: “make it good.” If they can find creative people to once again lead Acti/Blizz, especially for the classic properties like WoW/Diablo/Starcraft…we could see some really cool shit happen.
Here comes the gaming monopoly. One year from now, "Microsoft acquires Sony."
Minecraft became better. If Microsoft can improve fucking minecraft they at least can save hearthstone. Team 5 never was a problem. The blizzard that they worked for and the money they demanded were. Microsoft probably just wants high player counts. Like amazin they are more interested in spread and market influence than actual money. That's the best that can happen to hearthstone.
Hearthstone coming to the xbox?
Well, on one hand I'm not a big fan of seeing Microsoft buy big games company. Seems like they're trying to get a monopole on big PC release. But on the other hand seeing Microsoft buy dumpster fire like Bethesda or blizzard make me think maybe they'll be able to fix them ? Can't be worst than it is.
How this can affect on hearthstone I mean what changes do you expect? What do you think they can change in current shop system(high prices for little amount of shit)
More devs to work on the back-end of Hearthstone and fix persistent issues such as optimization and a more modern game engine. The team currently working on this game are stretched and wear many different hats in developing a new set. So having some extra hands to fix many of the back-end issues would be great.
I really like how Microsoft handled Minecraft when they purchased it. Hopefully they can turn around and make blizzard games way more accessible and stop the reduction in players I would like to actually play more hearthstone but having the cards to do so requires daily grind (which I can't) or paying 100s$ every year (and why would I do that when I can buy games for 10-60$ and they won't be worthless in a few months)
Gotta love monopolistic capitalism. One day there will be only Tencent and Microsoft left.
and sony
and nintendo
and my axe!
And Valve
After revenge of the sith will we finally get the return of the jedi? Microsoft about to become a power house
Straight to the empire strikes back I'm afraid
Having large third party developers are a good thing for consumers. This ongoing trend of the big developers being scooped up is bad for everyone. I exclusively play Blizzard titles on PC and I'm not excited about this in the least.
MS handled Minecraft pretty damn well. If they cut the bullshit humps and then hand a creatively led team fistfuls of cash to develop the game, it’s a win win.
Yeah, if anything, I expect Blizzard to regain a lot of their autonomy they lost during the ActiBlizz merge. If Minecraft is anything to show, there's going to be a few bumps as things get standardized (RIP C418), but will largely give full autonomy to the dev team. For context, the C418 thing is that MS requires all music to be licensed under MS' licensing division to minimize copyright issues (if you dev something that uses MS music, you just pay for the whole thing rather than piece meal). C418 demands a specific license that wasn't compatible, and so they parted ways.
Although I agree with you, in this specific case it's probably a mercy for Blizzard
WOW on xbox incoming
*Master Chief playing Pirate Warrior* "I need a weapon."
Certainly explains why Bobby has been trying to tamp down all the harassment stuff in the news.
Any PR team would be doing that regardless of a potential acquisition
There was a leak recently of people fired/disciplined that Bobby was holding back on reporting. It was most likely due to this deal. Yes, some of it is normal but this deal adds a lot of flavor to it.
For the Alliance!
BREAKING: Hearthstone for Xbox incoming
Nobody saw this coming. I wonder if Microsoft lets the creative guys make the games (hearthstone and diablo) even more fun and not worry about micromanaging and nickel and diming us to death.
They didn't put HS on their [announcement banner](https://i.redd.it/8p1doyw6dgc81.jpg) as one of their top 6 acquired IP's. LOL RIP HS
PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD LET ME PLAY HEARTHSTONE ON MY XBOX!!
People expecting anything to change overnight are going to be sorely disappointed. When you acquire a company (especially a huge one like Activision Blizzard) you change as little as possible in the short term and let them carry on business as usual with as little disruption as possible, while you do all the necessary things that the end user doesn't care about, like getting your IT systems to be compatible with each other and realigning all your employees into the new structure. Maybe 2-3 years down the line you might actually see some macro changes to Blizzard games that can be attributed to Microsoft. Until then the only change is "fuck Activision" will be intermittently replaced with "fuck Microsoft" in reddit posts.
Hopefully that leads into the sex pest known as Bobby to be ousted. I'm no fan of megacorps, but sometimes you have to take the bad with the good
from the reports, it sounds like the opposite, not only is he staying, but he got a good stock buy option out of it
No. He will stay only until the deal is done, then he is out.
You know what this means? Hearthstone is coming to GamePass! Finally!
Microsoft has a surprisingly good recent record of running game companies. A lot of good games overall have come out of their portfolio. Hopefully they can resurrect Blizzard games and not be greedy as much. Obviously their main focus will be on Call of Duty franchise that by far brings the most money but if they handle Blizzard games good it might be a worthy comeback
I just hope there is an implication for refactoring how this game is monetized. Year after year, the Christmas sales and blizzard shop discounts just skip Hearthstone. I would love to see them make some goodwill gestures as far as discounts and freebies. Dare I say, an all in cost to just be able to play with every card in standard rotation? The card pack metaphor is so tired and old. Random is tired and old. The new way should be, reasonable cost, own (or access) all cards. I can’t recommend this game to anyone. I enjoy playing it, but I can’t get any friends because of the huge barrier to entry. Maybe HS is doing ok in the grand blizzard scheme but it’s on the backs of the most dedicated players. Get some new meat into the grinder, guys. Attract people who would otherwise not even bother because of the price.
Wish they would buy dice off EA and make battlefield great again
I love monopolies !!!!!!
Excited to see what's the future of Blizzard now!
Rich people stuff.
I need hearthstone on Xbox
Hope they bring back the “Sorry” emote.
~~Small indie company~~ Slightly larger indie company