This letter will be given all the time and attention it deserves. I will bet money the signatories didn’t even read it.

I know Nintendo will never sell old games ala carte while it can squeeze subscription money from fans. But geez guys come on already.

And then everybody applauded Marine Todd.

My main problem was really with the temperature system. I quickly got annoyed with having to juggle all this garbage. Let me just solve puzzles in peace goddammit.

“Thanks! I hate it."

Godfrey and Godrick are a bit oldtimey but not terrible. I grew up around kids saddled with worse.

The main problem with buying teams, as a browse of this site’s archives can attest, is that it’s a real struggle to keep that talent and maintain what makes that team great. Although to be fair ABK’s doing a superb job of gutting their teams before Microsoft can get at them.

Honestly, stepping back objectively, buying any major third-party publisher right now is insane. Console gaming as a whole is facing some very serious problems as budgets on games go up and sales keep dropping as people tighten their belts. What you’re buying with any major publisher right now is a liability until the…

First of all, everything you’ve cited is in decline.

If the cost of playing CoD suddenly jumps to triple figures, what’s going to happen is a lot of people who like CoD will just stop playing it. Taking a third-party franchise console-exclusive has a terrible success rate as a strategy.

It’s a terrible idea. Hell, it’s a terrible idea for Microsoft! They absolutely should not be doing this, and why they’re doing it is beyond me. 

“The CMA now says that after receiving more detailed information about Call of Duty player spending, it’s clear that making the series exclusive to Xbox would lose Microsoft a ton of money.”

This is true, but ignores that Microsoft is going to lose a ton of money on this deal, period. ABK is not worth $69 billion. Wall…

There is no reality where Activision is actually worth $69 billion.

One question I’d love an answer to is why Microsoft isn’t trying to buy EA. It could play twice EA’s current market cap, renew the FIFA license for them, meet all their publicly stated business objectives, and still have a few billion left over.

There’s been LOADS of analysis on this and the consensus has always been that Microsoft doesn’t understand the Japanese market.

Sony is porting its exclusives to PC after a timed window, which means Xbox versions of those games would be pretty easy to do (relatively of course.) 

I give it a year at the outside before Borderlands But Make It Lovecraft shows up on the PS Store. The economics of first party exclusives just don't make sense anymore, unless they're all timed exclusives in the end.

The best case scenario is that they did this to boost the stock just long enough to dump it, and the big investors will cash out. But who knows? Eddie Lambert kneecapped Sears and that org crawled desperately towards an ever receding horizon for years before it finally died. Maybe they plan to do the same here.

I doubt it too, but the overall tenor of the market is what might sink it.

I was referring more to general financial system jitters/investor jitters. Now is not the time to pay a bloated price for a toy company showing every sign of looking to pass the buck on its liabilities before said liabilities lasso in the board and CEO.