Microsoft Might Sell X-Box!
[quote]Hollywood Reporter
NEW YORK -- As Vivendi Universal keeps mulling options for its U.S. entertainment assets, the media conglomerate is exploring a sale of its video game unit, with software giant Microsoft Corp. a possible acquirer, sources familiar with the situation said. Vivendi Uni and Microsoft have had initial contacts about a possible deal, but Vivendi Uni hasn't decided whether it will indeed sell the business, and no talks have advanced far enough to make a possible sales announcement imminent, they said. With a research note Friday, Investec analyst Jeff Van Rhee made the fate of the games unit the issue du jour in the ongoing industry chatter about Vivendi Uni's future.<hr></blockquote>
I cannot really provide a link because I got the news on IMDB Pro, which is a paid subcription service
NEW YORK -- As Vivendi Universal keeps mulling options for its U.S. entertainment assets, the media conglomerate is exploring a sale of its video game unit, with software giant Microsoft Corp. a possible acquirer, sources familiar with the situation said. Vivendi Uni and Microsoft have had initial contacts about a possible deal, but Vivendi Uni hasn't decided whether it will indeed sell the business, and no talks have advanced far enough to make a possible sales announcement imminent, they said. With a research note Friday, Investec analyst Jeff Van Rhee made the fate of the games unit the issue du jour in the ongoing industry chatter about Vivendi Uni's future.<hr></blockquote>
I cannot really provide a link because I got the news on IMDB Pro, which is a paid subcription service
Comments
[ 01-25-2003: Message edited by: 709 ]</p>
<a href="http://www.gamers.com/news/1304251"; target="_blank">http://www.gamers.com/news/1304251</a>;
<a href="http://www.lonegamers.com/cgi-bin/news.cgi?id=453"; target="_blank">http://www.lonegamers.com/cgi-bin/news.cgi?id=453</a>;
[quote] Vivendi would just be another company on the long list of companies Microsoft has boughten out, either through monopolies or completely legally (your decision). This list includes Rare, a large game developer bought for $275 million recently.
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<strong>Joy! No more Blizzard! (I can hardly wait... one more mac dev sucked into the black hole)</strong><hr></blockquote>
It was a very sad day indeed when Bungie was bought.
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It was a very sad day indeed when Bungie was bought.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Amen to that. RIP Mac Halo.
Luckiliy I have my trusty PS2!
<strong>
It was a very sad day indeed when Bungie was bought.</strong><hr></blockquote>
I just found the final Myth collection tonight at EB for $6.41. Sweet! Esp. since I can't find my old copy.
Yeah, the Bungie thing was a lot of crap. Buy 'em, cancel all Mac development.
Well the 'original' Halo did die, but the Halo that's on the Xbox is coming to the Mac later this year.
In fact, according to Macgamers.com the game is about to become playable (so before alpha).
The 'origional' Halo was dead before Microsft bought Bungie. There was an article on this some months back.
Basically, Halo started out as an RTS. (seriously)
The Warthog (Jeep) was created as a side-project to it. The Bungie team liked playing around with the Warthog so much they started to create a game around it. This eventually became "Halo '99" - the demo that was seen at MacWorld in July of 1999. A third-person shooter with the entire surface of Halo mapped out, with no constraints and no set goals along the way.
It was ambitious, to say the least.
Sometime afterwords, the Halo team ditched the third-person perspective.
Around the same time, the decision was made to make it into a more structured game.
Following that, Bungie was purchased by Microsoft.
Microsoft put time constraints on the Halo team and the middle levels suffered as a result.
People are always looking to blame Microsoft for all the changes in Halo that occured over a 2+ year period. Some things are their fault. Some are not.
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Well the 'original' Halo did die, but the Halo that's on the Xbox is coming to the Mac later this year.
In fact, according to Macgamers.com the game is about to become playable (so before alpha).</strong><hr></blockquote>
After waiting this long I'd be suprised if any Mac people actually buy Halo. Serious gamers surely have already played Halo, and I can't see a desktop version making a big splash without adding stuff not already on the set-top version. I'm not a big gamer. I was excited about Halo a couple-few years ago. Now I am not. The only thing I'm looking foward to now is Doom.
Included with the PC/Mac versions but not the Xbox version:
Online Play
New vehicles
New multiplayer levels (and the ability to release more new levels later)
Support for more than 4 machines / 16 players
I think there's more but I can't remember anything else right now. I was not buying Halo for the Mac as I didn't think I'd have a good enough computer to run it, but now that I'm trading my Pismo for a 1 GHz TiBook, I think I won't have an issue in getting it to work.
Also - congratulations on your new machine. You really deserve it.
It's a fairly disgusting business practice, but then again it's not illegal or immoral. It's a bad side-effect of the tendency for companies to go with IPO's prematurely. A non-public company can't be bought out as easily. . . (If I remember correctly MS had to shell out bigtime for Bungie)
Perhaps, in an evolutionary development, new tech firms will be less inclined to go IPO so suddenly. . . This will be especially more likely as VC's are less prominent.
Invisible Hand.
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People are always looking to blame Microsoft for all the changes in Halo that occured over a 2+ year period. Some things are their fault. Some are not.</strong><hr></blockquote>
There's a reason why Marks, Seropian, etc. left Bungie. I'm sure Seropian is laughing all the way to the bank, but he certainly didn't have the heart to stay with the monster he allowed MS to create.
Marathon was ambitious. Myth was ambitious. Bungie could have stuck to the 3rd person concept, but why do that when an FPS is a sure thing, and so much easier to develop?
<a href="http://bs.bungie.org/mtarchives/cat_sightings.html"; target="_blank">http://bs.bungie.org/mtarchives/cat_sightings.html</a>;
That's a very long list of amicable, but former Bungie employees.
[ 01-27-2003: Message edited by: Eugene ]</p>