I mean let’s all be serious, they did such a shit job it would have been cheaper to not do it at all. I’ve yet to see anyone call their strategy anything other than terrible. Even this site agrees it was bad. If you’re going to do your job, maybe don’t suck at it. 

What are you talking about? The claim is correct that limiting the availability of games to specific stores or launchers has a demonstrable detrimental effect on sales. It’s not just battle.net and CoD, EA and Ubisoft also experienced fallen sales figures after making their games launcher exclusive.

Very good points.

I get the sense that people just don’t realize how difficult it is, in a variety of industries, for independent operators to remain solvent in the face of increasing competition and investment. It’s even more pronounced in industries where there are significant barriers to entry due to the maturity of…

No, it doesn’t matter who up the parent chain makes the purchase and it certainly doesn’t matter if the parent has 50 vs 100 times the annual revenue of the company being bought. What matters is the effect it has on the markets the business operates in, now and in the future.

Microsoft, which is twice as big as Sony

Nah, they don’t even have a stranglehold now, you have Steam for computers. Nothing is stopping Sony from actually putting forth a good streaming model. Fact is, Sony has never put enough effort to streaming and most certainly can improve theirs in the next 10 years. And what’s stopping Amazon from getting into the…

You don’t see the difference between hiring people to develop first-party games, maintaining brand goodwill, and taking risks on new IPs versus not doing any of that and acquiring a large-ass company to make their previously existing games exclusive? Then think of it as the difference between getting gud and paying…

Because Microsoft will make them available on PC, SteamDeck, ROG Ally, and pretty much ever phone, and tablet in the world via streaming! So it DOES give tremendously more access!

Mergers and Acquisitions are bad, because of fewer choices for the consumer are built-in, jobs will be cut, and a company like Sony could end up buying up Square Enix to stay competitive with Microsoft.

Sekiro was developed by FROM, a third party dev. Vicarious Visions, who did the Crash and Tony Hawk’s remakes, is now Blizzard Albany and stuck on Diablo. Toys for Bob, who did the Spyro remakes and Crash 4, are supporting on COD now.

Mergers are not always negative as much as we tend to see them as such.

And yet there was no leg for the FTC to stand on to say, “If this goes through, all this shit will happen”. I get horizontal mergers and consolidation is really, really bad, but this is a vertical merger. It’s a huge one, but it’s going to help MS compete. Should MS just have made better exclusives and not totally…

Yeah that's never gonna happen. I've heard that story since the days of Atari. It's the perception that comes when the only knowledge of economics one has is the board game "Monopoly", which is nothing at all like the real world. 

Microsoft did nothing wrong with IE in terms of giving it away. The problem was entirely that Nutscrape threw a temper tantrum and started using every penny they had to sue rather than compete and make their browser worth paying for.

As a PC gamer this is a win. Microsoft has made huge commitments to share games day one with PC gamers, while Sony takes YEARS to allow them to be ported over.

the FTC made it about Sony and tried to pretend that Nintendo didn’t count despite consistently having some of the highest valued IPs. 

Making these games available via XBox Cloud and GeForce Now makes them much more widely accessible.

Great news, I have both consoles but the Game Pass value is going to increase dramatically when Sony’s contracts preventing games from coming to Game Pass expire. And I’ll still be able to play these games with my PS5 friends. I don’t really see why consumers are against this deal, unless they have an aversion to…

Activision Blizzard isn’t available for streaming. Microsoft entered into an agreement with Nvidia to bring Microsoft + AB (provided deal goes through) games to GeForce Now. That opens up access to people who may not have it otherwise.

Sony is still making more money than ActivisionBliz and microsoft combined currently. this deal makes microsoft the 3rd largest in the gaming market. blocking this merger is really just providing Sony an opportunity to solidify a monopoly they have been barreling towards since the xbox one flopped.