Microsoft, since Nadella's tenure has greatly changed in their community approach as opposed to the very closed-in and proprietary Microsoft way of the 90s. They are part of open source now, and they do have open source projects and initiatives that they actively support.
And it's a software company at its core. They have FAR more resources than Activision, Blizzard ever had or could ever dream of having at any point in the past. This is the company that represents the nr.1 operating system target for the vast majority of the video game developers out there.
In essence what this means: If they want to do something, they fucking sure as hell have all the tools to do it.
And from a reputation perspective, this is a giant that is fighting with Apple, Tesla and co in the stock market, they can't afford debacles and the moronic chaos that Activision Blizzard was. That alone is a clear win in itself.
Now for BW, this probably won't mean much in the short term, however I do feel they'll make a positive decision for this game in the future. Unfortunately I don't think it'll be any of the very rosey and optimistic things mentioned in this thread but it could be one of these few:
1. Fully open-sourcing the BW codebase. They'll want to keep their Starcraft franchise rights and so on but open sourcing the code and basically giving it away is entirely possible. From there on, the sky is the limit. Plenty of talented developers that would love to tinker with it (and advance it).
2. Greatly improving the infrastructure behind this game. Blizzard was cheaping out on keeping the user data on GCP for Remastered and judging by how poor any of that stuff is being represented in-game it probably can be improved by a migration to Azure (which MS owns).
3. Adopting everything BW into a consolidated team paid by Microsoft. They have all the RTS games at this point, so if they want to keep working on the game they can have the best paid team working on it. And from the AoE2 perspective, they have a far better idea on how to manage that kind of game than Activision ever did.
All in all, I'm very optimistic about any of this really. At the very core, I am close to 100% sure that there is hardly any way that this acquisition is not a great move forward for Starcraft.
On January 19 2022 17:42 evilfatsh1t wrote: 3 threads discussing the acquisition and im still struggling to see how the fuck they came up with a $70b valuation for this dogshit company. like seriously...what the fuck happened there?
My guess is that is the calculated cost to buy shares at a price that at least 50% of shareholders will be willing to part their shares for. That's how it generally works. But I still don't how how that would be $69billion. That seems to be greatly overvalued.
Well you don't invest for current value, you invest for what it might be worth down the line. A buy-out is also generally much higher than the current marked value of the company, and it's almost always seen as hitting the jackpot for the shareholders.
As someone else said, there are very smart people doing these calculations. We don't have the skill nor the information they have...
It basically means that Microsoft thinks that buying Activision now is a profitable investment. Meaning they can easily cover the costs of the investment in the long run. (and here I don't think it has to be a long-term investment anyways, because of the other points I've made throughout the thread).
Microsoft will be valuated at around 3 trillion dollars in a couple of years I think, so this is peanuts.
On January 20 2022 23:09 oxKnu wrote: They are part of open source now, and they do have open source projects and initiatives that they actively support.
Underestimate of the year. Microsoft not only supports open source project, they are the world largest Open Source company.
On January 20 2022 20:01 art_of_turtle wrote: A sure fire way to kill a game and community is to make it pay to play, like adding it to their Microsoft game pass for $9.99 a month.
Your away that game pass isn't the only way to play right? Some people want to buy individual games for $50-60. Some people want to pay $9.99 a month to play any of 100+ games.
Both can co-exist.
Did not know that. As long as I don't have to pay for this game again I guess it could be neutral.
On January 20 2022 20:01 art_of_turtle wrote: A sure fire way to kill a game and community is to make it pay to play, like adding it to their Microsoft game pass for $9.99 a month.
Your away that game pass isn't the only way to play right? Some people want to buy individual games for $50-60. Some people want to pay $9.99 a month to play any of 100+ games.
Both can co-exist.
Did not know that. As long as I don't have to pay for this game again I guess it could be neutral.
lol when remastered came out i remember people on the bnet forums pmuch rioting over having to pay for the game again.
"i bought this game in 1997, why should i have to pay for it again? fuck you blizzard" "i got this game at a flea market in 2007, paywalling ladder is bullshit"
but my absolute favorite was "i've pirated this game for twenty years. why the fuck do i have to pay for it now?"
To everyone who said things can't get worse, I disagree with such reasoning. My experience tells me it can always get worse, independently of how bad the current situation is. As far as I'm concerned this could be the beginning of a complete shutdown. Microsoft only cares about profits. I'll just wait and see what happens, I have distrust. Having cancer doesn't prevent getting AIDS.
On January 20 2022 23:09 oxKnu wrote: Microsoft, since Nadella's tenure has greatly changed in their community approach as opposed to the very closed-in and proprietary Microsoft way of the 90s. They are part of open source now, and they do have open source projects and initiatives that they actively support.
And it's a software company at its core. They have FAR more resources than Activision, Blizzard ever had or could ever dream of having at any point in the past. This is the company that represents the nr.1 operating system target for the vast majority of the video game developers out there.
In essence what this means: If they want to do something, they fucking sure as hell have all the tools to do it.
And from a reputation perspective, this is a giant that is fighting with Apple, Tesla and co in the stock market, they can't afford debacles and the moronic chaos that Activision Blizzard was. That alone is a clear win in itself.
Now for BW, this probably won't mean much in the short term, however I do feel they'll make a positive decision for this game in the future. Unfortunately I don't think it'll be any of the very rosey and optimistic things mentioned in this thread but it could be one of these few:
1. Fully open-sourcing the BW codebase. They'll want to keep their Starcraft franchise rights and so on but open sourcing the code and basically giving it away is entirely possible. From there on, the sky is the limit. Plenty of talented developers that would love to tinker with it (and advance it).
2. Greatly improving the infrastructure behind this game. Blizzard was cheaping out on keeping the user data on GCP for Remastered and judging by how poor any of that stuff is being represented in-game it probably can be improved by a migration to Azure (which MS owns).
3. Adopting everything BW into a consolidated team paid by Microsoft. They have all the RTS games at this point, so if they want to keep working on the game they can have the best paid team working on it. And from the AoE2 perspective, they have a far better idea on how to manage that kind of game than Activision ever did.
All in all, I'm very optimistic about any of this really. At the very core, I am close to 100% sure that there is hardly any way that this acquisition is not a great move forward for Starcraft.
It is generally extremely hard to open source old codebases, as they tend to contain a lot of proprietary code that you do not have the licenses to release. SC:R has not only this problem, but also contains a *ton* of modern shared Blizzard code now, for things like talking to their services, reporting telemetry, handling netcode, graphics, etc. It's extremely unlikely they're going to want to open source the code that runs e.g. Diablo 4 and Overwatch 2, so I think it's extremely unlikely they want to open source SC:R at all. Pretty much a pipe dream considering how much work it would be to do in the first place.
There are already ways of integrating with the game if you desire to do so, ShieldBattery does it. It's not as easy as reading a codebase but it also keeps the riffraff from finding the low hanging exploits (e.g. hacks). If anything, open sourcing tends to make a lot of these things *harder*, because companies often do so with licenses that are more restrictive than what is allowed via reverse engineering, and it becomes very hard to argue that you haven't used their source code (or derivative material of it) in development.
As far as #2 (moving to Azure), if you think this would make a positive difference you really have no idea what you're talking about tbh. Their choice of cloud platform has extremely little to do with any of the negative aspects you're talking about, this is just tech fanboy-ism without real understanding.
If you want to be optimistic, sure, be optimistic. I honestly think at this point nobody can have any clue whether this will be a good, bad, or neutral thing for BW. I can't imagine that "what are we going to do with SC:R?" was a front-of-mind question when considering this acquisition given that Blizzard has approximately 1 developer shared between SC2, WC3:R, and SC:R at this point. Let's just avoid giving people hope for stuff that is clearly not going to happen, and also avoid clamoring for Microsoft to do things that actually harms the community's current efforts and BW's long-term vitality.
On January 20 2022 23:09 oxKnu wrote: Microsoft, since Nadella's tenure has greatly changed in their community approach as opposed to the very closed-in and proprietary Microsoft way of the 90s. They are part of open source now, and they do have open source projects and initiatives that they actively support.
And it's a software company at its core. They have FAR more resources than Activision, Blizzard ever had or could ever dream of having at any point in the past. This is the company that represents the nr.1 operating system target for the vast majority of the video game developers out there.
In essence what this means: If they want to do something, they fucking sure as hell have all the tools to do it.
And from a reputation perspective, this is a giant that is fighting with Apple, Tesla and co in the stock market, they can't afford debacles and the moronic chaos that Activision Blizzard was. That alone is a clear win in itself.
Now for BW, this probably won't mean much in the short term, however I do feel they'll make a positive decision for this game in the future. Unfortunately I don't think it'll be any of the very rosey and optimistic things mentioned in this thread but it could be one of these few:
1. Fully open-sourcing the BW codebase. They'll want to keep their Starcraft franchise rights and so on but open sourcing the code and basically giving it away is entirely possible. From there on, the sky is the limit. Plenty of talented developers that would love to tinker with it (and advance it).
2. Greatly improving the infrastructure behind this game. Blizzard was cheaping out on keeping the user data on GCP for Remastered and judging by how poor any of that stuff is being represented in-game it probably can be improved by a migration to Azure (which MS owns).
3. Adopting everything BW into a consolidated team paid by Microsoft. They have all the RTS games at this point, so if they want to keep working on the game they can have the best paid team working on it. And from the AoE2 perspective, they have a far better idea on how to manage that kind of game than Activision ever did.
All in all, I'm very optimistic about any of this really. At the very core, I am close to 100% sure that there is hardly any way that this acquisition is not a great move forward for Starcraft.
Let's just avoid giving people hope for stuff that is clearly not going to happen, and also avoid clamoring for Microsoft to do things that actually harms the community's current efforts and BW's long-term vitality.
Clearly not going to happen? So it seems like you do have a very tangible idea on what Microsoft wants to do with the Blizzard IPs. Please do share that with the people here, like you can probably see everyone is on their toes waiting for the details...
Your work with Shield Battery has been amazing, however proper development from the publisher (ofc given that it's not at the sub-standard of Activsion that we've been accustomed to since Remastered launch) is vastly superior to the SB approach.
I don't expect you to agree but the statements that I've quoted here are ridiculous at best, not even calling them speculative is worth it.
On January 20 2022 23:09 oxKnu wrote: Microsoft, since Nadella's tenure has greatly changed in their community approach as opposed to the very closed-in and proprietary Microsoft way of the 90s. They are part of open source now, and they do have open source projects and initiatives that they actively support.
And it's a software company at its core. They have FAR more resources than Activision, Blizzard ever had or could ever dream of having at any point in the past. This is the company that represents the nr.1 operating system target for the vast majority of the video game developers out there.
In essence what this means: If they want to do something, they fucking sure as hell have all the tools to do it.
And from a reputation perspective, this is a giant that is fighting with Apple, Tesla and co in the stock market, they can't afford debacles and the moronic chaos that Activision Blizzard was. That alone is a clear win in itself.
Now for BW, this probably won't mean much in the short term, however I do feel they'll make a positive decision for this game in the future. Unfortunately I don't think it'll be any of the very rosey and optimistic things mentioned in this thread but it could be one of these few:
1. Fully open-sourcing the BW codebase. They'll want to keep their Starcraft franchise rights and so on but open sourcing the code and basically giving it away is entirely possible. From there on, the sky is the limit. Plenty of talented developers that would love to tinker with it (and advance it).
2. Greatly improving the infrastructure behind this game. Blizzard was cheaping out on keeping the user data on GCP for Remastered and judging by how poor any of that stuff is being represented in-game it probably can be improved by a migration to Azure (which MS owns).
3. Adopting everything BW into a consolidated team paid by Microsoft. They have all the RTS games at this point, so if they want to keep working on the game they can have the best paid team working on it. And from the AoE2 perspective, they have a far better idea on how to manage that kind of game than Activision ever did.
All in all, I'm very optimistic about any of this really. At the very core, I am close to 100% sure that there is hardly any way that this acquisition is not a great move forward for Starcraft.
Let's just avoid giving people hope for stuff that is clearly not going to happen, and also avoid clamoring for Microsoft to do things that actually harms the community's current efforts and BW's long-term vitality.
Clearly not going to happen? So it seems like you do have a very tangible idea on what Microsoft wants to do with the Blizzard IPs. Please do share that with the people here, like you can probably see everyone is on their toes waiting for the details...
Your work with Shield Battery has been amazing, however proper development from the publisher (ofc given that it's not at the sub-standard of Activsion that we've been accustomed to since Remastered launch) is vastly superior to the SB approach.
In the part of my post that you snipped out I told you exactly why it was extremely unlikely that they would open source the code. If you don't like that reasoning because it doesn't coincide with what you'd like to happen, I'm not really sure what to tell you, it is very much the reality of the situation.
I don't expect you to agree but the statements that I've quoted here are ridiculous at best, not even calling them speculative is worth it.
I honestly have no idea what this sentence is even trying to say (the only thing you quoted was a part of my post?) so I'm not sure how you would like me to respond to it.
The Microsoft earnings call was today and there was a lot of talk about the metaverse. Higher-ups implying that it might be the next big wave of the Internet going forward.
In line with what I was expecting and I think work on something big might start as soon as Q2 even.
Unfortunately, I don't think anything related to SC, unless they try to spin Heroes of The Storm somehow for that medium. If I had to bet, I would go with WoW.
On January 19 2022 17:37 LUCKY_NOOB wrote: $68.7 billion is $69 billion rounded up... NOT 70 like the title says... I love razersuke but u fucked that one up BIG TIME!
The first headline I read quoted 70B, something like this:
On January 21 2022 16:50 Headgehog wrote: Lets hope SC3 is going to be a reality, and we'll control the game by voice/mic or maybe VR set, other than mouse & keyboard, imagine giving orders/actions with a voice in SC3, and how the APM will be calculated then
Hello and if I would also like to be an S rank, what am I supposed to do concretely? I would also like to participate in the contest, because I also really like games. One of my friends told me that I can easily find the clothes for the tournament on this web platform, is it true?
EPT
