this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
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Gaming
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I'm not in favour of this merger, but I don't understand how the FTC let Disney buy Fox and yet they have a problem with this.
Wasn't the Disney stuff under Trump's administration?
It seems Biden (from an outside perspective, as I am not from the US) is at least trying to reign in companies a bit, so this block isn't that surprising.
The EU decision surprised me more, but I can understand their arguments.
As a gamer, this could be great in the short term, with Activision-Blizzard getting good leadership and hopefully new games from franchises which are not CoD or Diablo.
Medium/Long term, it could be awful, with Microsoft getting more and more market share and then turning around and fucking us in the ass really hard after they lock us in their ecosystem
Is there ecosystem bad?
Any company's "ecosystem" is bad
Not when there's competition that drives improvement across the comparable choices. Personally, I see this deal as a good thing long-term because it would force Sony to continue actually competing after having been complacent the entire PS4 generation. Most of the potential downsides stem from Microsoft owning Call of Duty and being able to bend it to their whim, but people here should know better than anyone that having alternatives to a massive, increasingly shitty product is a good thing, and Sony will be busting their ass to get one up, running, and popular prior to that 10 year deadline.
Corporate mergers reduce competition, not increase it
Exactly, I don't see how Microsoft taking Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Starfield, and other games away from Sony and Nintendo increases competition.
It just forces people to buy into their ecosystem (Xbox or Windows) if they want to play the games they could play in their prefered platform before
To really have a real choice you need to have interoperable choices at several levels. Choosing between two jails is not really a choice.
Right now?
No, I don't think so.
But Windows is getting worse, and GamePass won't be cheap forever.
Same with them putting the games on Steam, it can change on a whim.
I mean, even on PC, nothing stops them from walking back and just making everything Xbox exclusive in the future again.
They can make changes that make it impossible (or extremely hard) for their games to work on Linux using Proton.
There are many ways they can use these company mergers to fuck the consumer in the future.
Consolidation is always a bad thing, in my opinion, because it takes away choice from the consumer and puts it in the hands of trillion-dollar companies whose sole objective is to make ALL the money all the time, forever.