Lots of obvious astroturfing going on regarding this. I've seen this news everywhere from Slashdot to Reddit with people sucking Microsofts dick. It's either that, or people are too young to remember the bullshit Microsoft pulled ... since forever basically. People aren't going to benefit from this merger. Microsoft is patient. Embrace, extend, extinguish is their strategy. 10 year agreements are nothing for them to wait out.
And it's the same with every merger -- "This will bring more competition, blah blah blah", then merger goes through and half the people are fired, half the rest are rolled into existing systems, and some empty shell of the previous company just wanders along with no real spirit any longer.
Yeah I can see that. Nadella brought new energy and almost made MSFT look cool, but years later we can see how MSFT is basically gobbling up everything in every domain.
Update: Why am I being downvoted? Did you all forget that MSFT has acquired LinkedIn, GitHub, Mojang, Bethesda, ABK and 49% stake in OpenAI all under Satya? Each one of those are massive acquisitions.
Microsoft are far, far, far from being close to the leader in the market even with ABK on their books, so your FUD makes no sense. Pretty much no one in the entire industry is against the acquisition apart from their main competitor, Sony, who are the market leader and abuse that position every day of the year to pull content away from Microsoft.
ABK will operate like they do currently, just like Bethesda do, only now they have Microsoft money and backing.
The only people that this deal is bad for are people who only play on PlayStation consoles. Everyone else benefits.
You said nothing will change. They will be part of the microcrap veil and will follow their ways of doing things. Like not hire people and only contract for 18 months then get in new contractors to pick up where the recently fired left off... Like what happened at 343i.
I’m not happy with the state of consolidation in every market under the sun, but I’m sure as shit happy Bobby Kotick is finally going to fuck off and I’m happy I’ll be able to play activision games on gamepass. When gamepass inevitably enshitifies I’ll just get rid of my subscription.