Microsoft Is Now Accountable for Activision Blizzard’s Mess

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Microsoft just announced that it plans to acquire Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion.

It is yet another sign of increasing consolidation in the big budget video game business, and just the latest acquisition for Microsoft, which has been on a bit of a spree to bolster its library of games, most recently with its acquisition of Skyrim and Doom publisher Bethesda.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/y3vbnk/microsoft-is-now-accountable-for-activision-blizzards-mess
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So this is awful right? I’m not seeing how this isn’t anything but extremely awful. Bad for competitiveness in the industry, bad for unionization efforts since now they have to fight a colossal company and its super-colossal parent company, bad because they said “metaverse”, just awful.

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There’s going to be a couple months in late 2023 where it’ll be a great time to be a Game Pass subscriber and then it’s all downhill from there

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Not wanting to be the curmudgeon, but this has always been my problem with Game Pass… it’s exactly the kind of gateway drug to platform/service dependence that also helps people “justify” these kind of mergers from short-term thinking.

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I’ve been trying to take a longer view on it for precisely that reason. I’ve been thinking a lot about Netflix as it stands today (as opposed to Microsoft trying to fashion itself the Netflix of games) and how

  1. it’s a lot more sparse
  2. Netflix’s homegrown content is generally Not Great

Occasionally you get The Witcher, but for every one of those you get at least a half dozen Wu Assassins (they got the Raid boys to do a vaguely Eastern Mysticism TV show with great fights and literally nothing else going for it - a one season wonder) that pass completely unremarked upon

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Well, and also the Netflix model seems to have bred the “obvious” conclusion in a captialist environment (the development of enough competitors to render all of the space “not quite enough for anyone”).

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Honestly the closer analogy for Microsoft/Game Pass might be Disney Plus. You have all that stuff you like from that one group PLUS (no pun intended) all that stuff you like from that OTHER group etc. To say nothing of the day-and-date releases on Game Pass and nowhere else. Netflix at least had initial competition from Hulu; Microsoft is out here with that Disney flexing and there isn’t even any competition in the space.

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