Microsoft is doubling down on its huge gaming bet as it strikes a deal to acquire Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion. CEO Satya Nadella explains that the will play a key role in the development of metaverse platforms at Microsoft. In other words, they’re not leaving this space to Meta/Facebook.

Microsoft gains iconic titles in the deal:

Microsoft is acquiring Activision, the troubled publisher of Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, and Diablo. The deal will value Activision at $68.7 billion, far in excess of the $26 billion Microsoft paid to acquire LinkedIn in 2016. It’s Microsoft’s biggest push into gaming, and the company says it will be the “third-largest gaming company by revenue, behind Tencent and Sony” once the deal closes.

Microsoft plans to add many of Activision’s games to Xbox Game Pass once the deal closes. With the acquisition of Activision, Microsoft will soon publish franchises like Warcraft, Diablo, Overwatch, Call of Duty, and Candy Crush. “Upon close, we will offer as many Activision Blizzard games as we can within Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass, both new titles and games from Activision Blizzard’s incredible catalog,” says Microsoft’s CEO of gaming Phil Spencer.

There have been tons of problems at Activision Blizzard regarding allegations of sexual harassment. Microsoft will have plenty to deal with through any transition. For gamers it will be interesting to see if this creative studio will thrive or wilt under the Microsoft umbrella. Nadella is an excellent CEO so their track record is improving.

Oh joy of joys, oh bliss, sweet bliss — the annual Steam Summer Sale is back again. As if Steam wasn’t glorious enough, once a year (well twice if you count the holiday sale) they run wild on their deep catalog of downloads and slash prices to insane degrees.

The sale runs until July 22nd and kicks off today with such deals as “Portal 2” for $4.99, “CoD Modern Warfare 3” for $29.99, and entire developer collections like Rockstar, Ubisoft and friggin Bethesda for severely reduced prices on complete collections and individual titles. That means you can buy “Skyrim,” “Fallout: New Vegas” (plus all the expansions), and “Brink” and “Hunted” thrown in for the hell of it for $49.99. It’s such an unbelievable deal, it should have an infomercial at 3 A.M.

Apparently, though, not everyone shares my enthusiasm over this epic event. Particularly, a rep from EA named David Demartini, who heads up the direct download service Origin. According to David, the Steam sale represents a desperate act that will ultimately hurt the industry by making gamers believe that there is no need to buy a game immediately if the same title is going to be available later at incredibly reduced prices. He even goes so far as to compare Steam to Target stores saying, “We’re not trying to be Target. We’re trying to be Nordstrom.”

Valve, being awesome, responds to this with the usual, saying that first day, first week, and even first month sales are all bigger than they have been in a while, and even remind Mr. Demartini that they offer their own titles on sale too, saying, “If we thought having a 75 per cent sale on ‘Portal 2’ would cheapen ‘Portal 2,’ we wouldn’t do it. We know there are all kinds of ways customers consume things, get value, come back, build franchises. We think lots of those things strengthen it.”

The thing is, of course, is that EA is right. If companies wanted to make more bottom line money, they would follow EA’s strategy. But that’s not the point, is it? This sale isn’t done for Valve’s benefit, or the benefit of the industry at large, but rather is ten measly days out of the year they set aside to do something just for gamers. As far as EA’s theory that they are trying to be Nordstrom, and Steam is Target, it doesn’t really hold water when you consider they are selling the same quality products. Also, doesn’t Nordstrom offer sales also?

But hey, picking on EA is like criticizing a Michael Bay movie. Too easy, and a little sad. No, instead, let’s continue to ignore the fact that EA has a stream service at all and focus on this incredible Steam Summer Sale, of which right now I would recommend jumping on the “Walking Dead Season Collection” and the almost unbelievable 24-game Valve complete pack. To quote Ferris Bueller: “It is so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up.”

I’ve never really thought I had a problem with video games. Well, I still can’t beat Mike Tyson in “Punch-Out,” and the only reason I’ve ever gotten past that driving level in “Mafia” is by cheating, but what I mean is that I’ve never felt like I’ve ever had trouble balancing games with the rest of my life. While gaming is one of my great passions, I’ve been fortunate enough to find other passions in life that made it impossible to think about spending all of my waking time with just one of them.

However, I do realize that video game addiction is a problem that exists. For former NFL defensive lineman Quinn Pitcock, it’s a very real problem that may keep him out of the league.

Pitcock refers to himself as an introvert who can spend 18 hours a day playing “Call of Duty.” He says that, “The only way I could get my endorphins was by playing video games.” Realizing the depths of his addiction, he has gone to such dramatic lengths as physically breaking his games to try to make up for not being able to stop playing via his own will. Yet for all of his efforts, he has so far been unable to break his crippling addiction.

More than just register as a gross personal flaw, though, this is a problem that may permanently affect Pitcock’s career. That’s because he retired from football in 2008, after a somewhat impressive rookie season with the Indianapolis Colts, and has made two different unsuccessful attempts at a comeback since. Pitcock says he immediately regretted his decision to retire originally, but instead of refocusing his efforts to get back into the game, he instead sank deeper into his drug of choice. While he does play for the Orlando Predators of the Arena Football League (and the Indianapolis Colts helped him find a psychologist to help with his addiction), he now has recently revealed that he has a legitimate worry that NFL teams will not trust him to be successful in his recovery efforts.

“They’re more comfortable with a drug addiction,” Pitcock says. “It’s unfortunate. It definitely hinders my chances.”

While that may sound like a ludicrous statement to some, the fact is that video game addiction is a mental addiction, which is considered much more problematic to break than a physical one. Let’s not forget the plight of one of the most talented football players of all time, Ricky Williams, whose addiction to marijuana was so severe that he once stated that his desire to smoke marijuana was greater than his desire to play football. Marijuana, like video games, is not a drug that is considered to be supremely addictive or inherently dangerous. Yet to the right mindset, both can be just as dangerous as any other substance.

I almost wrote this piece as a humorous article. The NFL player who’d rather play “Madden”…something like that. But the truth is that it’s hard not to feel sympathetic to Quinn Pitcock. Like I said, I’ve been lucky enough to find other passions that have kept my life from revolving around video games entirely, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t brief flirtations with having it become a problem.

To make it to the NFL, it takes an almost inhuman mix of skill and dedication. It’s obvious that on some level Quinn Pitcock still has both. However, as Voltaire said, “It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.” Hopefully, Pitcock will be able to able to find the right balance in his life for all of his passions, and live without those chains.

Like certain stories or parties, some games can’t be properly explained and you just had to be there for them to fully understand what they meant.

A quick disclaimer. I’m not saying these are bad games. They are just games that were hugely significant at one point, but lost whatever it was that made them special over time, and are left as something that is less than what they were.

“Conker’s Bad Fur Day”

I’ll never forget reading the April edition of Electronic Gaming Monthly (that was a video game magazine to you youngsters) and first hearing about this. You see, EGM used to run a fake article for its April edition as an April Fools Day joke. In the year 2000, there was a preview so absurd that everyone that read it groaned at how lazy the staff was getting at their pranks. It was a sneak peek of the then titled” Conker 64“, that alleged that developer Rare was going to turn the cute and colorful world of Conker into a dark and violent hell, and make Conker himself into a potty mouth, perverted anti-hero. The magazine was flooded with letters from readers saying that they had spotted the obvious gag this time, and that the editors would have to try a lot harder next year.

Of course, that preview would turn out to be the only thing about the game that wasn’t a joke.

I don’t know when it finally sank in that the game wasn’t a prank, but even while playing it I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. To this day I’ve never seen a game try to be so deliberately offensive, and succeed. Conker drank, cursed, screwed, and belittled across an adventure that saw you go to war, get drunk, pee out giant fires, rip the skin off of a bulls ass, help pollinate a horny and well endowed flower, and (most infamously) take on a giant singing pile of poo. This game had pure humor running through its veins, and every second was filled with some sort of gag or movie parody (which were actually quite excellent) that demanded that you kept playing in order to see what absurdity the game had for you in its next set piece. If you were like me and played this at the tender age of 13, it was hard not to believe it was in the sliced bread pantheon of greatest things ever.

Time reveals a different tale of course. For instance though the game was beautiful for its day, (released at the tail end of the N64, its considered one of the best looking games on the system) it still carries that murky and dull 64 look. The gameplay is also pretty atrocious as it mostly consists of making your way from context sensitive action button to context sensitive action button, and fills out its time with annoying fetch quests and segments so frustrating that they were later trimmed down or taken out entirely for the games Xbox remake. Finally that humor just doesn’t ring as true anymore. The game is still funny in its own way, but unless you carry the same sense of humor I did at the aforementioned 13, you’re going to find little incentive to keep playing.

“Conker’s Bad Fur Day” is still a noteworthy and entertaining game (its multiplayer mode especially), but unless you played it when it came out, you won’t get that same punch in the gut feeling it delivered that pretty much forced you to bow down to what you were witnessing.

Modern Equivalent: That’s tough. You almost have to look at the opposite, and imagine Kratos from “God of War” starring in a cute and cuddly platformer. Or if they made “The Human Centipede” into a game where you played a cartoon centipede trying to stop a Saturday morning mad scentist. Even then, Conker is in a league of its own.

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I’ve heard in the past that Infinity Ward has a less than cordial relationship with Activision. The shit finally hit the fan this morning, though, when two of IW’s top guys took a hike after meeting with the publisher.

At some point yesterday, Vince Zampella and Jason West met with Activision, after which they didn’t return to IW offices. Instead, a bunch of “bouncer-types” came around, presumably to ensure that neither exec would come back to work. By noon today both Zampella and West had updated their LinkedIn profiles to include Infinity Ward as previous experience.

Kotaku also dug up an SEC filing from yesterday that showed Activision had launched an investigation at IW for “insubordination” and “breaches of contract” regarding “two senior employees.” Activision has since confirmed both departures and announced the formation of a special division dedicated to churning out one Call of Duty game every year. Looks like the company will continue to bank on that franchise as a major source of revenue for as long as it can.