Thought that Microsoft giving 7+ billions for Zenimax was extreme? How about an eye-watering 70 billions for Activision-Blizzard?
https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-buy-activision-blizzard-deal-687-billion-2022-01-18/

While unlikely for anything bad to happen right now to their catalog here (at least if Bethesda is any indication), nobody knows what the future holds, so backup your Activision-Blizzard installers.

This actually might make Activision and Blizzard less objectionable. The one thing you can say about this era of Microsoft is that they're turning into half-decent stewards and letting the developers get on with things.

Of course, it could always go the same way as the 2000s Microsoft ownership (see Lionhead for example)

This is insane!!

However something just came up in my mind: now that Microsoft owns both id and Raven, Wolfenstein 2009 and Heretic II can come back from publishing/licences hell.
And maybe Raven can become what it once was, and not a cod supportive studio.

Hopefully it's not wishfull thinking.

Great, Microsoft swallows yet another company, just what the world needs. /s

This would never get past US anti-trust laws.

It did all the times before.

Edit: Just look at this list.

Looks like they're after more of the large multiplayer markets.
Hopefully they will ignore the old single-player games, a miniscule and insignificant market compared to the above.

Remember when the US government broke up Microsoft back in 2000 for becoming dominating in the computer marketplace? Yeah, they won't allow MS to buy Acti-Blizz because it will end the same way with MS becoming the dominating force in the computer games marketplace.

I'm pretty sure he means the ones on GOG - Warcraft, Warcraft 2 and Diablo.

EDIT: Sorry, actually there's a lot more, for some reason I was only thinking of Blizzard, but this is about all of Activision.

Anyway, it doesn't really concern me. I have not touched anything by Acti-Blizz for years and years. I'm never happy to see giant companies grow even bigger and all IPs get gathered under increasingly few banners of mega-corps, but in this case it's not like Acti-Blizz wasn't one already, so there's not that much change.

I don't know, but for AAA publishers - EA (who has Origin); Take-2; UbiSoft (who has UPLAY / UbiSoft Connect); Sony; and Square Enix are STILL competition to Microsoft.

Besides companies above - Steam and Epic are competitors for digital PC gaming download stores too.

EDIT - Nintendo is also competition for Microsoft w/ that Switch and all.

Aaah, ok, now I get it. But not worried in this matter, I think that GOG is only place where I've backuped all installers for my entire library :)

Why wouldn't it ?

For it to be blocked by anti-trust laws it would need to be... well... a trust.

Here even with them owning Activision Microsoft is pretty far from becoming a monopoly as far as gaming is concerned.

This also puts under Microsoft umbrella - Arcanum IP.
Microsoft owns Obsidian, InXile, and Bethesda, so....can we get Arcanum 2?

I guess this means that the Activision-Blizzard games not on GOG will still have near-zero chances to show up here?