I imagine the owner of Microsoft in his black chair, with a cat saying “hahahaah. I like things going accord the plan”, with evil malicious laughter.

Well, yes, it’s about money. They sell us toys. If there weren’t toys to sell Bobby Kotick would probably be on a used car lot somewhere, assuring a buyer that of course the undercoating is a great deal.

For me the bigger question is why these deals are happening. Both the Activision and Zynga sales are simply bad ideas…

“To put it in perspective, both financially and culturally, this is a “Disney buys Pixar and Star Wars and Marvel, Hulu AND 20th Century Fox”.

Half a century ago, when Marx was writing Capital, free competition appeared to the overwhelming majority of economists to be a “natural law”. Official science tried, by a conspiracy of silence, to kill the works of Marx, who by a theoretical and historical analysis of capitalism had proved that free competition…

Even though it’s a publicly traded company, this all makes Nintendo look like an independent developer who makes boutique games. They really are the last man with any integrity, standing. You know that someone like Disney is licking their lips at all that sweet sweet IP.

So let’s remove the emotion and hot takes from the discussion for a moment and look at this realistically. There is no Scenario where Bobby Kotick pays for his behavior. He could be removed from his position tomorrow, and he is still a billionaire who sits on the board of the worlds largest soft drink producer, and…

The only thing we as gamers still have going for us is that we have options. Limited options, yes, but options still. Don’t like a game? Buy something else. Don’t like a console? Buy the other one.

Sci-fi has been warning us about this since the 70s so I’m surprised it took this long, frankly

So the FTC opened up public commenting on proposed updates to antitrust policy today. I think this couldn’t have come at a better time. It seems to me that if you make a move that your competitors literally can’t afford to counter, that should be considered an anti-competitive/monopolistic action.

I imagine Microsoft has been waiting to buy either ea or activision for a while just looking for the opportune moment and the bludgeoning their stock price took motivated both sides to come to a deal quickly.

Thank you Luke for being one of the few people sincere about the shiftiness of this situation.

It’s boring and it’s dangerous (monopolies are ironically terrible for a free and open market), but even bleaker than the economic realities is the fact that in a system where only the pursuit of profits matter, there is no room for justice. Bobby Kotick deserved to be booted out of Activision with nothing. Instead…

I imagine Microsoft has been waiting to buy either ea or activision for a while just looking for the opportune moment and the bludgeoning their stock price took motivated both sides to come to a deal quickly.

This was a good read, sad of course but very insightful. 

The conspiratorial part of my brain now wonders whether Microsoft was fanning the flames of the Activision controversy to bring the price into their range and create a narrative for their massive reorganization of the publisher. It’s just as possible that they are simply taking advantage of the disarray to advance…

Weyland-Yutani bought OCP. Cyberpunk is becoming just reality.

I kept reading “more damaging than Facebook” the wrong way, again and again, but I do get what you’re saying.

The most upsetting thing here is how this will just accelerate further buyouts. And IMO it’s way worse than all of those media company buy outs, because it’s relatively easy for your average consumer to hop between streaming services, so there isn’t much lock-in. Video game consumers are going to lose SO much more…

When you can’t branch out, you root in. This is the mantra Microsoft has with acquiring Activision now. First, the hardcore games space with Bethesda. Now, Acitivision, with a mobile games division by the way.

Well said. To bad ABK won’t terminate him for cause before the signing. He technically is in violation and could be terminated under For Cause per the contract under definitions 3 and 4.