Community MetaSteam | May 2024 - Wake up samurai, we gonna get this Persian kitty home

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spindoctor

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Jun 9, 2019
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There is no evidence that this is happening but it does make me question as to why ABK was so expensive. Out of all their IPs isn't CoD and Candy Crush their two most valuable IPs? Or was there something else making them so expensive?
Whenever a company acquires another public company they usually end up paying a premium for the shares. Activision Blizzard had a market cap of over 50 billion dollars when Microsoft announced the acquisition at the price of 68 billion dollars. It was a good acquisition because they managed to get the company when it's value had fallen... at it's peak ATVI was worth 80 billion dollars.

As to whether the company was worth that much qualitatively, I think the answer is still yes. Gamers hate Bobby Kotick for a variety of reasons, many of which are very silly, but he is objectively the best performing CEO this industry has ever seen. He bought Activision in the early 90s and sold it in 2023. It was his life's work and in that time he took the company from next to nothing all the way to 70 billion dollars. According to an article on GI.biz he gave his shareholders an 8000% return on investment in the last 2 decades. His acquisition of Blizzard and King were inspired choices. I don't know if you remember the pre-2004 era where gaming was mostly looked upon as a 'hobby for nerds' sort of thing. World of Warcraft was the first game to break through to find a mainstream audience. And then the Wii came along and blew the market wide open. Activision recognized this and also the fact that Blizzard used to (and still does) print money and bought them. Then came the King acquisition which instantly made them one of the biggest players in the mobile gaming market, which, in case anyone doesn't know, is the biggest and fastest growing market in this industry. And then there's the fact that Kotick shepherded Call of Duty into one of the biggest entertainment franchises the world has ever seen. Best selling game of the year for 15 years in a row (aside from the 2 Rockstar years) is an insane achievement. People online love to hate COD but it makes billions every year because they have kept their audience consistently happy for so long. People also get angry that they buried IPs like Crash Bandicoot or whatever and put the studios 'into the Call of Duty mines' but this is why they did it, because it makes so much money. It was the correct choice.

Anyway, that 80 billion dollar valuation was the height of the pandemic. Then things started going wrong for them with all the bad PR coming out of their subsidiaries and the various government investigations and lawsuits. That's when their stock price went down and their market cap dropped and Microsoft was able to buy them at a 'discount'. It's possible Kotick didn't want to deal with all the legal problems and stuff or maybe after 35 years he decided he had enough and sold the company.

But yeah, COD, King and Blizzard make it absolutely worth the price.

If this news is real, I wonder how they come up with the 16 billion dollar number for Valve. They wouldn't just pick it out of a hat.
 
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fantomena

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Dec 17, 2018
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As Gabe said, piracy is a service problem, if MS buys Valve and turns it into shit, we can still always go back to torrenting all that shit and be as happy as always. They are stealing all our data, so only fair we steal some of theirs.
But there are so many smaller good and great indies that are also never released on torrent sites.
 

yuraya

MetaMember
May 4, 2019
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Microsoft buys Valve

1 day later Steam becomes green and the Xbox logo is plastered all over the client

3 days later Steam is integrated with Windows app store and all of a sudden things start breaking apart. Sometimes the client doesn't launch at all. You need to visit Microsoft help support to understand what is happening.

5 days later Steam features start disappearing. Stats no longer show instead you get links to subscribe to Gamepass Ultimate. The activity feed is full of Xbox achievements.

10 days later AI takes over Steam and advertisements pop up all over the place. The AI will recommend what games you should play and sometimes forces you to play them even if you launch other games. You now see Doritos and Mountain dew adverts before you launch every game.

15 days later playing multiplayer games on Steam will now cost you 15$ per month. You can reduce this price by using Bing every day of the month.

30 days later Microsoft shuts down Counter Strike as it is competitively hurting Call of Duty.

At this point the transition is fully complete. Steam users complain and protest as much as they can but they become memes as everyone can see the boycott Steam group is not serious.

In the end this thread changes the title to PCgamingMeta and the Epic Game Store thread suddenly sees a surge of positive posts.
 

Nabs

Hyper˗Toxic Pro˗Consumer
Oct 23, 2018
3,800
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Nightdive FPS Humble Bundle


$20
Turok 3; Shadow of Oblivion Remastered

$15
Rise of the Triad Ludicrous Edition
Powerslave Exhumed

$10
Doom 64
Turok 2: Seeds of Evil
Foresaken Remastered

$5
Blood: Fresh Supply
Turok
Sin: Gold
 

yuraya

MetaMember
May 4, 2019
2,550
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Atlus about to release the 5th entry in a series at full price so they finally realized its a good idea to discount the 3rd entry (that is a 20 year old PS2 game) down to what it is supposed to be priced at.

Logic prevails huh.

At times like this I really do wish flash deals were still a thing. There are thousands of games on Steam that need to be discounted a further 25-50% during the sales.
 

toxicitizen

MetaMember
Oct 24, 2018
1,578
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Bro, where the hell is the RDR1 PC announcement, GOW Ragnarock PC announcement, PlayStation Showcase announcement? I'm getting impatient here lol
Lmao we got Ghost of Tsushima's release and Kingdom Hearts' announcement in the last week alone. Chill. :p

But also where's TLoU Part II...
 
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yuraya

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May 4, 2019
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I don't really see Sony being able to put together a good showcase anytime soon. They already did a blowout for Death Stranding 2 earlier in the year. And the next big 1st party game from them is probably Wolverine. I think its too early for that. There were rumors of Tsushima 2 so I guess that would make for a good showing. I don't think they have much releasing in the next 12 months outside of DS2.

So the show will mostly have to be 3rd party games. Something new from Resident Evil or maybe they show off Kingdom Hearts 4.

Snake Eater remake gameplay would be nice too.

Maybe they spend 10 minutes talking about PS5Pro to fill up the time but that will be kinda of lame.

But yea I don't see them putting on a show that is better than Xbox, Ubi and Summer Game Fest. All of those shows are gonna be loaded.
 
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PC-tan

Low Tier Weeb
Jan 19, 2019
3,610
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California
Wait, Japan never had those games on Steam before?

When is MC gonna embed X links? :D
Bandai has region locked all the Naruto games from what I recall so people in Japan can't play those. They can play all the One Piece games though I think,
 
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rickyson33

Junior Member
Apr 26, 2019
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i'll take an AI program that makes it look like my entire Steam library is installed, I keep a bunch installed just for the sake of it but I only have so much space

it doesn't even need to actually download anything since it's not like i'm ever gonna launch them anyways, I just want the illusion
 

spindoctor

MetaMember
Jun 9, 2019
872
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I said I wouldn't idle cards anymore, since it messes up the personal steam end of year review which I quite like, but I have sooo many games that have cards to be dropped!
I have a solution for this. The year in review thing appears in the second week of December and tracking for the next year obviously doesn't start until January. So just hold on to all your cards until the yearly review is out so it won't mess up any of your stats and then idle everything in the 2 weeks you have before tracking starts again.
 
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