Microsoft is shopping for Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion, assuming the FTC would not take subject with the most important acquisition in gaming historical past. The transfer has big implications for PC gaming and means Microsoft now owns a dizzying array of game studios. After poring over the catalog of traditional video games Microsoft’s getting within the acquisition, we spun up our imaginations and took a shot at predicting what Microsoft will do now.
Listed below are 28 issues this deal makes potential. Virtually all of them will certainly come to cross.
1. Apple feels critical FOMO, panic-buys Electronics Arts for $68.8 billion.
2. Nobody at Microsoft understands what Overwatch 2 is. Like, it is a sequel, but it surely’s additionally the identical recreation? Executives determine to rename it Overwatch 360 to keep away from confusion.
3. Somebody floats the “MGU,” the Microsoft Gaming Universe, in a board assembly. Another person’s total job is to determine how one can get Spiderman to visitor star.
4. Phil Spencer says the phrases “Tony Hawk 3+4 remake” on a livestream. Thousands and thousands of 37-year-olds spontaneously burst into tears.
5. Crash Bandicoot 4 developer Toys For Bob will get to take a crack at Uncommon’s long-neglected platformer collection Banjo Kazooie and Conker. Heck, Jet Pressure Gemini.
6. Double High quality will get its decide of Sierra’s journey recreation collection to reboot. Tim Schafer inexplicably passes up King’s Quest and Area Quest to make a violent, erotic thriller titled Phantasmagoria: The Flesh Returns.
7. Blizzard’s total again catalog will get added to PC Recreation Move. Warcraft 3 and Starcraft: Brood Warfare change into esports once more.
8. Clippy joins Overwatch, is S-Tier.
9. Microsoft’s dealing with of an Activision Blizzard unionization effort units a precedent for the whole tech trade’s subsequent decade of employee rights battles.
10. To swap weapons within the subsequent Name of Obligation you may have to open your stock in a Microsoft Edge browser tab.
11. Microsoft tries to show Battle.internet right into a full-on Steam competitor, simply as we had been getting used to all of its video games being on Steam.
12. Each single co-worker in your Microsoft Groups name is now an Overwatch character vtuber.
13. Microsoft releases a mash-up of Minesweeper and StarCraft. They name it Minecraft, resulting in months of chaos.
14. Microtransactions in big-budget videogames change into much more obnoxious as increasingly more folks play them by way of Recreation Move as an alternative of shopping for them outright.
15. Bobby Kotick actually cackles all the best way to the financial institution.
16. Grasp Chief might be in Name of Obligation now. Nothing will cease this.
17. E3 returns in 2027 simply so a future Activision government can announce the revival of Guitar Hero by shredding on a plastic guitar on stage. Huge fits are again in, which actually completes the picture.
18. Obsidian makes a brand new Quest For Glory. It kicks ass.
19. 2009’s underrated Wolfenstein is lastly out there once more.
20. Ninja Principle’s subsequent recreation is a shock gritty reboot of The Misplaced Vikings aiming to rival God of Warfare.
21. We begin calling first-person shooters “Doom clones” once more, as Raven and MachineGames use id Tech to make new video games.
22. After the success of Gears Techniques, Microsoft goes onerous on style crossovers, making a Halo MMO, a StarCraft FPS and a Name of Obligation visible novel.
23. Blinx the Time Sweeper threatens to rewind time and stop the Activision Blizzard takeover if he would not get a sequel out of the deal.
24. When writing an Outlook e mail to your human assets division Clippy will pop up and say “It appears to be like such as you’re making an attempt to write down a grievance! I am going to wreck you! I am going to wreck you and your lawyer and you may by no means work once more!” earlier than providing you a settlement of $200,000.
25. As a belated apology for shuttering Lionhead, Microsoft decides to convey again Weird Creations, publicizes a brand new Geometry Wars and Blur 2, then closes it for unknown causes a number of months earlier than the discharge of both.
26. Disney responds by shopping for Fb, Amazon buys Sony, Tiktok buys Discord, Apple buys Nintendo, Tencent buys the literal moon, and Microsoft, in a panic to maintain up, by accident tries to purchase itself for $3 bluhzillion. Fortunately it is knowledgeable bluhzillion isn’t an precise quantity.
27. Because the New York Instances appropriately purports, this $68.7 billion sale is about one factor solely: the metaverse. Utilizing the intense physique warmth of all of the always livid Name of Obligation gamers it now owns and has positioned into Matrix-like vitality pods crammed with pink Jell-O, Microsoft is the primary to develop and unveil the metaverse. Mark Zuckerberg is crushed to lose the battle for the metaverse and renames Meta to TheFacebook, however as foretold by Justin Timberlake in that film, the “The” is not “clear” and TheFacebook rapidly tanks. Its customers, hungry for a continuing stream of covid conspiracy theories and MLM schemes, flock to Microsoft’s new metaverse. In the meantime, Tim Sweeney’s heartbreakingly stunning imaginative and prescient of the metaverse—a spot the place car producers can extra simply promote you a automotive—tragically by no means involves cross. Despondent and drunk on catfish-flavored moonshine, he deletes Fortnite by smashing its servers with the blunt finish of an axe as a result of that is how folks dramatically destroy servers in films. With nowhere to yell the n-word whereas dressed as bananas, white pre-teens flock to Microsoft’s new metaverse together with outdated and bewildered former TheFacebook customers, however the metaverse seems to only be Minecraft in VR which has been out there since, like, 2016. Microsoft rapidly goes underneath and folks, with nothing left to do, instantly crash Twitter by sharing too many Wordle scores. With gaming and the web destroyed, the New Darkish Age of Earth begins. Solely a anonymous few survive.
28. After the $68.7 billion greenback sale, Kotick buys PC Gamer for $68.6 billion and all of us retire with personalised platinum helicopters.
