Blizzard has already been doing that for a while. Also failing with new franchises, not investing in their core games, half assing releases. I hope they actually turn things around for games like Starcraft, Diablo, HotS etc
Blizzard would never have done that if Activision hadn’t been allowed to buy them. The new conglomerate will be worse than we anticipate in the same way Activion-Blizzard was.
Blizzard has pretty much only made amazing games before Activision bought them. Activision also made a lot of good games back then. People couldn’t see how the merger would fick it up back then, yet it still did.
I expect Bethesda to get infected with the worst that Activion-Blizzard has to offer more so than the opposite.
Most of those are already shit (Fallout, Diablo, Overwatch, call of duty) or shelved 25+ years ago (Commander Keen, Hexen, Phantasmagoria…). Microsoft’s own games are rather good compared to Activision Blizzar or even Bethesda.
It’s probably because so many of them are mediocre or don’t really exist as modern games. It’s kinda sad that out of that list, there are so few 10/10 series there.
Look at them including perfect dark in the list as if they’d have the balls to make another sequel after they botched the last one after essentially using it as a launch exclusive title for the 360… such a shame. Perfect dark 64 was a masterpiece.
Ultimately the problem with Perfect Dark as a franchise is that everyone who made it great went off and formed Free Radical and made the TimeSplitters games.
Microsoft at least owns the trademark on it. Not being a lawyer, I don’t know if that’s at all decoupled from “the IP” or not, but I suspect they’d be tied fairly close together.
It would also be weird if Mistwalker signed a contract giving MS ownership of Blue Dragon (which is on the list, but has multiple games from different publishers) but not Lost Odyssey. I guess maybe the solution would be to remove Blue Dragon from the list rather than adding Lost Odyssey. 🤷♂️
Ori and the Will of the Wisps(Great)
Sunset Overdrive(Good)
Battletoads(Good, at least I enjoyed it)
Forza Horizon 4 and 5(both are good, but definitely feeling a little repetitive and overly done now for me)
Flight Simulator
That is all I got though. and technically Forza Horizon 4 is 5 years and 12 days.
Released in 2014, so while good, doesn’t quite fit the “from the last 5 years” criteria (unless you’re specifically talking about the PC port, which just squeaks in by a month, but I’m not sure that’s quite in the spirit of the discussion).
Point of Forza, driving cars around in circles will get repetitive after some point tho. I played Horizon 4 much more than 5 because 4 has a ranked system. I’m definitely going to play more Horizon 5 if they have a ranked system.