I am in a similar boat, but i don’t think this is THAT big of a deal.
Blizzard is mostly a shell of its former self. FF14 has taken over as the default theme park MMO and Riot own the majority of the sweaty RTS super genre. Also whatever Overwatch counted as.
As for Activision proper? Mostly they’ve let their IPs languish in favor of CoD. And CoD is still huge, but it is not the industry controlling monster it used to be AND MS are “committed” to keeping that multi-platform (because that is where the money is).
I still think Bethesda/Zenimax was the big “holy shit” acquisition. Obviously Skyrim is one of the biggest games of all time and prints money. But it was mostly all the sub-studios (Machine Games, for example) that very much dominate the “third party” market.
I think King is probably the really big part of this acquisition but… I’ve never understood the mobile market so I am not even sure if that is still as dominant as I think it is?
Neato@kbin.social 1 year ago
It's really bad. This is all about Game Pass. MS wants to acquire enough of the industry big IPs to force people onto Game Pass. All of tech right now is trying really hard to get people locked into subscriptions because it's effectively free, easy money. You don't have to convince consumers to constantly buy new stuff. You just need to dissuade them from canceling a subscription, which is much easier.
Then they just gobble up more of the market share until they've hit their theoretical maximum. Then they can raise prices because they've captured the market and driven competitors away. They've already made it so you pretty much need Game Pass if you own an Xbox. Long-term they could stop selling PC games on Steam, but they probably won't because the PC market is so much smaller than console and they can point to that as a "win" for consumer choice.
Sony has nothing successful enough compared to Game Pass and as they fall further behind they'll likely abandon it entirely.
Reverendender@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Then enshitification sets in and all the games suck.
Techmaster@lemm.ee 1 year ago
We’re well past that point.