Gaming

Once again you talk about it like the are owed the #1 place rather than having to, you know, compete for it.

Not at all. I'm saying they have little chance of making Sony even sweat without the acquisition or something like it. Even after this deal, they will not be the #1 console. It will just be closer, and close enough that they decide to stay in the console business.

By the way, a paradigm shift is already happening. For a lot of people their phones are their primary computing and gaming platform, and while I'm not a fan of the practices in it, a significant change in the market is anything but unpredictable.

That seems to be a parallel market rather than one that would overtake it. There's a non-zero amount of overlap, and you can find plenty of examples, but there seem to be games built for mobile and games that aren't. If this is the paradigm shift you expect to shake things up, are you saying you expect Apple or Samsung to enter the console market?

It would be a false dichotomy to treat acquisition and leaving the gaming market as the only two options. After all, aren't all the other companies they already acquired appealing enough? Or weren't they worth it? And if they weren't, why would this fix anything?

You know how Spotify has exclusives besides Joe Rogan but still got Joe Rogan exclusive? It's the same answer. A bunch of smaller acquisitions move the needle a little bit each. One large acquisition moves the needle a lot on its own. In aggregate, they all make the product desirable. Microsoft needs to move the needle a lot to catch up to Sony.

Sony cannot relax or they could catch up

Maybe now after this deal they can't relax, but they've been going down this path of requiring arbitrary upgrades from PS4 to PS5 in a way that Microsoft had not been, which is the kind of move you only make when you're relaxed enough to take advantage of your customers. Plus their own exclusivity deals.

If you think it's shady that Sony paid to have FF16 as an exclusive, why are you defending that Microsoft does that to Starfield? At least when it comes to Sony, Microsoft could have outbid Square for exclusivity

Defending is the wrong word. Why do you think Microsoft has Starfield? Because they outbid Sony. This acquisition happened because they outbid Sony as well. At the scale that Microsoft is operating at, they may as well buy them outright; and word on the street was that Zenimax and Square Enix were both seeking to be acquired. Activision only makes like 4-6 franchises anymore anyway, so it's basically the same thing as buying exclusivity to those franchises but with more upside.

It could be funding new studios, it could be playing from Sony's handbook

Exclusivity and studio acquisitions are both out of Sony's handbook. Microsoft just has a bigger pocketbook.

The ideal solution here, is that Microsoft's acquisition should be blocked but Sony should also be punished for anti-consumer tactics.

The ideal solution here is one that forbids exclusivity, but I have no idea how to do that ethically.