Microsoft completes $69B deal to buy Activision Blizzard

It’s not Sonys fault that Microsoft destroyed their first party dominance while Sony was curating their exclusive titles.

Microsoft endorsed enshittification and got complacent. Sony didn’t.

Microsoft lost their previously winning position through incompetence in a single console generation, and that doesn’t all of a sudden make buying up and making several studios exclusive “fair competition”.

“Fair competition” is not using your other business lines to subsidize harming consumers because you made several years of terrible decisions.

What’s more, Microsoft’s throwing money around to just buy a position in the gaming market is showing through clear review manipulation (Starfalls wall of 10s for what’s clearly a 5-6/10).

For any other company this purchase is viewed as anti-competitive. Microsoft’s arguments were fucking toddler level. How consumer protections managed to bungle this so badly to prevent the sale is likely to go down in law education for “what not to do”. All the lawyers involved in the consumer protection side should be disbarred on the basis of complete incompetence.

I was absolutely bored by age 4. I really like age 2hd however.

where is hellbender. hover 95. ski free?

It's not, though. I don't think Starfield is bad -- it's well-produced and rich with many widely beloved game elements from earlier Bethesda project -- but it focused on the ElderScrolls/Fallout bits that I didn't care so much about and pushed aside the parts that absorbed me into those games.

Specifically, the other franchises let you literally just wander around through a hand-crafted world stumbling into who knows what. There are very few games that can deliver that because the hand-crafted thing is sooo labor intensive and expensive.

But Starfield failed to deliver on that. There are countless quests and destinations and rich dialog trees, but if I just push forward on my control stick, I will immediately leave "hand-crafted" behind in favor of "procedurally generated" and then I will hit a wall in at most 30-40 minutes. That's so tremendously different than what I was able to do in the other games that I just didn't have a reason to play anymore.

Bethesda wasn't obliged to deliver on the bits I personally loved about the other games, but I (and some others) were legitimately bummed when they didn't.

> We're talking about game prices

No we're not, we're talking about the total cost of console gaming, because that's what actually matters when you're discussing the effect on consumers.

> It's hard not to acknowledge the fact that Microsoft is getting perfectly positioned to clamp everyone down into their ecosystem harder than ever

No, it's hard to imagine where you're getting that from at all, if you're talking about their gaming arm. Microsoft isn't positioned to clamp down on anything in gaming. They're simply trying to compete against their more successful competitor Sony.

> I don't think the attitude of "let's let them get as big as possible and hope they don't abuse that power" is healthy.

I don't think the attitude of "let Sony's gaming business be as big as it already is, but don't allow Microsoft's gaming business to try to expand to match Sony's" is healthy. That's literally anti-competitive.

UK regulators were objecting the deal because they were concerned that the takeover would reduce competition in cloud gaming.

Microsoft gave game streaming rights to Ubisoft, which made the Activision deal possible: https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/13/why-microsoft-had-to-relin...

"For Ubisoft, this deal means it has full and exclusive cloud-streaming rights to all current commercially available Activision games, as well as those released in the next 15 years." !!!

Ubisoft is the real winner here.