This is a nearly meaningless distinction. Sony’s first-party games only exist because they bought up other studios in the past.

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…

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.

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…

What monopoly? There is no monopoly here. There is a large company getting bought by a huge company, but definitely no monopoly. Let’s be real here. The biggest problem with this deal, in my opinion, is the consolidation of gaming franchises to a smaller number of companies and just the general allowance of companies…

Right? It’s like I can’t play Spiderman, Horizon, Last of Us or the recent Final Fantasy remasters (to name a few), but I don’t complain because it’s not worth it, to me, to buy a Playstation simply to play exclusives. I already turn on my Switch maybe once every two years because their exclusives seem to come out on…

And even then it still wouldn't be a monopoly because PC.

Right, but if I buy a ticket to Indiana Jones and then decide I want to go to a baseball game instead, my ticket purchase is still counted even though I’m not there.  The point is that what is being counted is dollar sales, not attendance.

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 as a company, counting all its products and services, is larger than Sony. Nobody denied that. But Xbox is MUCH smaller than Playstation or Nintendo. All this does is give them an extra feather in their cap to compete with.

This is sarcasm, right? Considering how Sony was acting like this merger going through would spell certain doom for them.

Do you carry the same energy for all of the exclusives held by Sony and Nintendo that have never seen the light of day on either PC or an Xbox console? If you don’t, then you’re being rather hypocritical, as even though CoD is a big seller, both Sony and Nintendo have exclusives that have sold in the tens of millions…

It was the only play they had.

If they focused on the broader centralization of IPs and console exclusives, Microsoft could and would easily hit back and show that Sony’s exclusives have been conclusively outselling Microsoft’s, dating all the way back to the PS2/Xbox era.

There’s also the reality that Microsoft would…

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

Excellent! This is awesome news. Looking forward to see what MS does with Blizzard as they need a kick in their bum and some new blood.

Does it also have issues with murderous clowns?

I’m hoping against pure reason that this is actually a marketing stunt to promote the 4K blu-ray release that this movie deserves.

How is that shenanigans?  If someone buys an extra ticket, then they’ve paid for that ticket and it rightfully gets counted in the box office.

“it’s not like child sex trafficking isn’t a real problem that exists”