Microsoft Considering Buying EA or Valve And PUBG?

Microsoft buying valve is good news for Half Life 3, bad news for steam...
 
Well MS can't do much worse with EA than EA has done with themselves. I wonder what that would mean for all the licenses EA has. I can't imagine that a buyout wouldn't cause MS to have to renogiate deals with NFL, the Player's Club, Disney, and so on.
 
Let them buy obsidian and let them do their thing, should be a nice addition.
 
Let them buy obsidian and let them do their thing, should be a nice addition.

Hell no. Keep all publishers the hell away from Obsidian. Obsidian has been doing great on their own lately and big publisher involvement would only mean bad things.
 
They could probably get Bluehole. I don’t think EA or Valve are feasible though
 
Microsoft trying to buy valve would be interesting, due to its cross platform support.
Microsoft buying EA sounds good as I don't think EA can get any worse.
 
They could probably get Bluehole. I don’t think EA or Valve are feasible though

MS has at least $130 billion in cash sitting around. More than enough to convince EA shareholders to sell. Valve is a tougher situation. Gabe owns 100% of Valve, MS would have to convince him to sell and that might take more than just a pile of cash.
 
Microsoft trying to buy valve would be interesting, due to its cross platform support.
Microsoft buying EA sounds good as I don't think EA can get any worse.

Are you crazy? Steam would get features cut and it would shift to a mobile first prospective. And the store would be integrated into a future Win OS and be used to shove mobile versions of their software down your throat. That is the worst thing that could happen. Good news is I doubt Newell will ever consider MS buying them seeing how much he opposed the Win store. I hope he doesn't die anytime soon.

EA, same deal. Origin is a nice alternate to Steam and they have done a decent job with BF4 being a PC oriented game. MS is bad news for PC gaming outside of DX.
 
releasing something is not better then nothing if the something in question turns out to be a poor imitation of the original...

Well, I disagree to an extent. That said, Microsoft makes some pretty decent games from their first party studios.

A half decent Half life 3 is better than no half life 3
 
This whole conversation stems from Microsoft not having enough IPs to be competitive with Sony. If Valve were to sell anything to Microsoft I would hope maybe they would license a Portal, Left 4 Dead, or Half Life with supervision from Valve.
 
That will NEVER happen with Gabe at the helm of Valve.
I pretty much agree.
You mean the guy who stopped making games the exact nanosecond he found a way to make swimming pools of money doing literally anything else wouldn't decide to sell his company for several billion dollars?
well, he's already a billionaire he's got everything he needs for the rest of his life. he doesn't want to sell out to M$ but anything can happen untill both sides shut this talk down.

Well, I disagree to an extent. That said, Microsoft makes some pretty decent games from their first party studios.

A half decent Half-life 3 is better than no half life 3
Not exactly. it' doesn't have to be the greatest game ever. but it still needs to be 9.0 good.

The EA thing would be crazy though.(madden on pc again?) and has more of a chance than the valve buyout i think. i think pubg is only a matter of time.(unless something crazy happens)
 
One main problem with valve is their structure, they don't seem to get anything done anymore other then raking in the big bucks from steam, if you want more first party games you actually need to buy a company that can churn them out at a decent rate.

Installing a "regular" company structure could help but could also kill what makes valve "valve"
 
You forgot the /s.

Can anyone name a single consumer focused hardware or software product that got better after MS acquired it? No, no you can't. Because everything Microsoft touches .. dies.

Good point.... I don't play it, but I read that Minecraft hasn't been terrible since getting acquired.
 
Good point.... I don't play it, but I read that Minecraft hasn't been terrible since getting acquired.

Inertia. Nothing's actually improved with Minecraft. They abandoned the real deal moddable PC version and pushed the watered down pocket/mobile version, infesting it with microtransactions. The one in the Windows 10 store is just the pocket version.
 
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You forgot the /s.

Can anyone name a single consumer focused company, service, hardware or software product that got better after MS acquired it? No, no you can't. Because everything Microsoft touches .. dies.

Nokia is still twitching :p
 
If Microsoft buys Valve, what's to say they don't get rid of Gabe?

AFAIK, Valve is a private company, with Gabe as the sole owner. No way for MSFT to legally buy Valve without going through him.


So.... that is a big if, and whatever happens to lead to that point, will have to be with the blessing of the man who owns Valve.


Fuck it, since the last wild hostile takeovers of the 80s and 90s, even public companies have plenty of tricks up their sleeves to stop an unwanted takeover.
 
If I were MS, PUBG isn’t a bad look but that developer right now is a one trick pony - Bluehole has a couple other games but it isn’t a deep bench.

Valve, with both Steam and Source would be a great pickup, but I don’t think Gabe would let it go for anything that would make sense for MS to acquire.

EA is a publisher not necessarily a big developer - that doesn’t make much sense. Some of the studios that work with EA (such as Bioware or DICE) — maybe.

A good thought would be Epic - they have a history of being able to make a few good titles and a very profitable game engine. It would be a similar pickup as Valve, but without all the valuation of a huge digital storefront behind it. And they have the biggest rival to PUBG.

Crytek would be a similar situation but aren’t they already in some kind of deal wit Amazon and Lumberyard - that would probably sink that, and Crytek isn’t quite as prolific as Epic has been.

In a similar vein to Valve and Epic, Unity would be a good business to pick up, but they don’t really have any IP or game development to leverage that could help push XBox growth.

CD Project Red would be a good studio to shoot for if you are looking for a proven developer with some good IP. (I would hate it if it happened though). CCP wouldn’t be a bad thought either. If you wanted to really think outside the box - Cloud Imperium would be a very good pursuit for Microsoft. I bet you could pick up the remnants of 38 Studios for pennies on the dollar, and they had a decent IP going before they ran afoul.

I don’t think they could purchase it, but working out a deal with TenCent would be able to go a long way too.

My personal thought - they should double down on the fact that XBox runs on x86 and Win10 - really start pushing the cross platform angle on the Windows store harder. Add some TV desktop experience to Xbox (even if it’s just a Desktop streaming makeover). Make it easier/larger incentives for Windows developer to migrate existing PC games/apps to XBox - that’s a huge library that could potentially be very easily migrated over and would probably move more consoles than 360 compatibility. Also really try to leverage cross platform gameplay (even with other consoles) - as that frames Sony as a bad guy.

XBox shouldn’t be a competing entity to PC gaming / they should be complementary and right now MS is missing that almost entirely.
 
Crytek would be a similar situation but aren’t they already in some kind of deal wit Amazon and Lumberyard - that would probably sink that, and Crytek isn’t quite as prolific as Epic has been.

CD Project Red would be a good studio to shoot for if you are looking for a proven developer with some good IP. (I would hate it if it happened though). CCP wouldn’t be a bad thought either. If you wanted to really think outside the box - Cloud Imperium would be a very good pursuit for Microsoft. I bet you could pick up the remnants of 38 Studios for pennies on the dollar, and they had a decent IP going before they ran afoul.

I thought Crytek was as good as bankrupt or have they recovered? They were unable to pay their staff some time ago.

Not sure CD projekt red is what MS needs, they make awesome games, but at a very slow pace, also would mean gog could go the way of the dodo which I'm not sure is something I like.
 
You forgot the /s.

Can anyone name a single consumer focused company, service, hardware or software product that got better after MS acquired it? No, no you can't.


Because everything Microsoft touches .. dies.

Yes, I can't wait to play the new Freelancer game...oh wait!



I'm downright unpleasantly amazed at either the short memories, the whitewashing revisionism...or whatever ...that some people in this thread apparently have in regards to this.

EA probably has the crown now for what you described but MS has never changed their ways and their track record is ghastly.

No thanks to any of this.
 
This is a really bad idea unless they only care about money which this is the case.
Gabe used to work for Microsoft so it's a natural fit but only if they keep the Steam Client the same and don't shut it down or anything stupid like that.
 
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Yeah we really need Microsoft to change the Steam client into something like this a big mess.
 
My personal prefernce here would be for MS just to get out of the console hardware business altogether, and to focus on making a “Xbox” release of the OS that runs on third party hardware.

It would be closer to the Steam Machine idea - provide a spec and the software but let other people make the hardware. The big margins are in the licensing and digital storefronts anyway - not the actual hardware.
 
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