Microsoft Buying Off Companies

So when will Clippy be announced as an NPC?

I suspect it was that or activision/blizzard went bankrupt and disappeared, theres not a chance they would have been allowed to undertake the acquisition otherwise, the problem with getting too much of the market share in any case is always the same, regulations are used to either force you to spin off parts or hamper further expansion...

the entertainment industry is massive, if they had purchased cdpr or EA I expect there would have been backlash but blizzard screwed the pooch financially speaking before the activision merger and activision suffered some serious hits as a result nobody else was willing to fund them from outside the industry fast enough to stave off the need to a buyout and none of the other companies were small enough wiht a large enough bank balance to be permitted buying them up... 

on top of all that just like with other acquisitions and mergers in the past I suspect the MS will either kill them off in the next 5 years or make a killing from them, bungie/343 were both effectively kaput when MS plucked them from the jaws of oblivion in the past and went on to make a fortune, but such is the way of big buisness, the more parts there are the harder it is to  stay above the redline...

also wouldn't be overly surprised if this wasn't an issue of needing to acquire certain patents for hud development, I mean they had that whole continuum thing they tried to launch in the past that flopped due to lacklustre end product purely through lacking various IP... and given MS put in so much to that endeavour seeing it get revamped and released in the near future might even make life more interesting who knows.

I doubt however its as simple as them wanting to try to strong arm Sony over the PSN yet again, I mean they won last time and forced Sony into basically making the same console as MS do (they effectively both run the same hardware and software, the case and UI just looks different) in return for Sony being permitted to have PS exclusive titles.... 

it would be weird if the world forgot about the CELL CPU and how it screwed up games development... Sony of course caved to pressure and jumped to x86 architecture. Heck they both use the same generation AMD APU's since intel dropped the ball on production, but it lets dev's effectively make a single game for both consoles and pc's which only need minor porting tweaks... (which is why a lot of "pc games" are glitchy trash instead of epic, made on pc compiled to console and ported to pc missing half the drivers....) 

its likely that as part of the development of various products and applications for the FIST branch they will endeavour to partner with EA what with them owning at least 3 tech patents that would make a few things a lot simpler...

the thing is a lot of the games industry are happy hippies who want nothing to do with the military so they actively fight against their stuff being used by it, yet the military has one of the largest user bases for those same products... 

ive been  in various simulators and the ones down the arcade were light years ahead of the ones on base in terms of GUI, but at the same time the hardware on base was decades ahead of the stuff they have available for the public....  

the early attempts at fist all ended up in a hodgepodge becasue the software was haphazzard (at best) there were versions that worked and every single one of them couldn't be used due to patents and copyrights.... when MS joined up with the DoD and NATO to undertake various games type projects despite the half assed nature of it those battle simulators were actually pretty good even as limited as they were back then, if they could do the same thing again today I suspect they would be friggin fantastic since the display tech is so much better, but just as fragile and prone to the troops breaking it without even trying.... 

theres a lot of potential for games companies to join defence group projects but the vast majority seem to think its a bad idea and would rather go out of business than give in to the men in black, I dont know that they are wrong about it right now, I mean its not like we have a unified earth defence force that needs the planet to work together to defend against an outside threat... so why do they need to work for "The Man" 

of course I'd rather they worked for a NATO member than the opposition so if EA was going to get bought out by what many view as a government stooge let it be MS that does it rather than tencent  

Couldn't be worse than what Activision has done to Blizzard honestly. If I'm getting another Starcraft I'm happy.

the scary thing is they could have used the civi interface on the military stuff, could have made it more ergonomic as well... they didnt for 2 reasons, the fuckwits in the brass didnt like the idea of soldiers "playing games"  and they didnt want "secrets" getting out....  so they hired some folks of questionable moral fibre and flexible thinking to help coble together something that would "suffice"  who promptly used the secrets they gained access too improve the next gen arcade gear and of course we also got some amazing cinema techniques out of it (iirc the first one to really use the suit sensor stuff was LOTR, but they had to create lesser quality hardware, worked mostly in slow motion and used all those motion sensors to model movement for movies rather than the way the military sims used it) 

so theres a cross over between them and its not all about chucking money at something until it works, that is the preferred approach that a lot of government departments take for sure but thats why they have auditors and oversight, and you only ever get raked over the coals publicly if your expensive overruns didnt produce outstanding results... well I expect that since space command is a thing in another 5 years the US DoD will have purchased half the games industry and we'll have immersion pods so the public can field test deep dive rigs before they have an epic screwup and loose half a starfleet to folks going stir crazy on long range missions....