Microsoft Gaming Acquisitions

Microsoft has been keeping the Windows platform away from the gaming market in favor of Xbox, I'd imagine to avoid competing with themselves. Xbox has to have been getting subsidies from somewhere to run Game Pass. Despite all this help, they do seem to be stuck third place. Excluding Nintendo as a competitor seems wrong, it's not just about current-gen.I don't play Activision/Blizzard games or use Xbox so I'm not really invested, but I tend to oppose market consolida

Do you really expect them to continue this practice if they own a dominant share of exclusive new games? With Minecraft they did the opposite: they made bedrock a windows exclusive, and required going through the MS storefront to access it.MS's track record seems to be only to be pro-consumer so long as it helps their bottom line.

So Microsoft failing for a decade to bring titles to their console means that it’s okay to remove titles from Sony gamers?The consoles today don’t have identical catalogs. That’s where your argument falls apart. One company made a decade of bad decisions which caused them to fall behind.In a fair market where Microsoft didn’t have trillions in resources to just steal the market, Phil Spencer would be fired and Xbox gaming would be looking for better direction.Also, Microsoft was granted

I doubt this. Microsoft has spent last years integrating PC gaming under XBOX brand too. E.g. XBOX Game Pass for PC, or adding controller support etc.They even promote so called "Xbox Play Anywhere", and tried to make it normal for the new XBOX so that you can buy a single game and play it on PC and XBOX. However the gaming studios haven't yet to my knowledge approved it fully so they want to sell you the game twice.After all the PC gaming benefits Microsoft too.

When Sony buys company to make exclusives - good. When Microsoft - bad

Its not like MS haven't done the "buy company, make new stuff exclusive" stuff before (recently bethesda). Hardware companies buy software and making it platform exclusvie (Apple, Microsoft, Sony..). Its generally just bad for us consumers.[1]https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/22/23523576&

The logic doesn't make sense, and Microsoft also doesn't have a market power advantage here.The Xbox Series X/S has been a bit of a boondoggle and Sony is vastly outselling Microsoft this generation. Not to mention the existence of Nintendo, Valve and other PC gaming stores. The argument that this would weaken competition for gaming consoles is laughable.Sony and Nintendo have exclusive games to gain an advantage. Now an American company wants to do the same thing, and they

Why shouldn't the deal be blocked?Whatever services MS want from Activision they can purchase on an ongoing basis without blocking others like Sony just to block the competition.Who wants Call of Duty to go xbox only like Halo?Microsoft is a platform provider, the content creators that use their platform should be free to publish to any platform. Otherwise Microsoft bump the prices and say take it or leave it but you can't get it anywhere else.

I work at MS not in gaming. I actually may be okay with this. I think Microsoft’s incentives are to grow gamepass subscriptions, which may work with this play anywhere mantra. I have my doubts that Xbox will not be seeing dollar signs though if they can make all of those exclusives. I think it depends on the relative size of Xbox users vs total video gamers.

It’s annoying that MS will probably pull the same crap they did when they purchased Bethesda a couple of years ago: we won’t see releases of most Activision/Blizzard games on Sony consoles going forward.This exclusivity game has to stop. I understand MS’s motivations — they want people to buy their console, after all. But it’s awful that you can make an educated console decision, and then two years later have a good chunk of games stolen from you because of a merger.I concur that I’d