Personally, on the one hand, yes they are going to have more exclusives, but that’s PlayStation’s whole model since forever, they can’t talk about that.
On the other hand, PS acquires and/or founds small/medium size studios, they don’t go and buy Activision-sized companies and make established cross-console AAA titles exclusive overnight.
So I think I’m against the acquisition, but not really sure lol
I think we’re in a weird spot where there is currently less competition to make amazing games because Sony has been so dominant. It came out in the FTC trial (or because of it?) that Sony just pays developers for exclusivity. If the console with 80% of your sales is going to also give you extra money, why wouldn’t you take that?? Then as a consumer, the pattern becomes that Xbox gets less exclusives (or gets games a year later). Why would I buy an Xbox if it’s roughly equal to PS but gets games a year later lol?? This is like a vicious cycle.
The exclusivity deals and consolidation are 100% anti-consumer but I’m hopeful that this will redouble PS-Xbox’s competition. E.g., it looks like Xbox really wants starfield to be a massive success; they could have released the game last year but they opted for another year of polish in order to cement a huge winner for the platform. What if every major exclusive got that treatment? That is a win for gamers imo. Only time will tell.
To add to this, if Microsoft wasn’t the one attempting to buy out Activision, then the alternative was going to be some other big company like Google, Amazon or Tencent, IMO we would be worse off in those situations.
The console race in the last 20 years has really allowed whatever leader exists to be anti-consumer, Xbox showed this when they were dominating for most of the 360 era, and as Sony clawed back market-share towards the end, as well as taking advantage of the Xbox blunders towards the beginning of last generation, they also started to go back to anti-consumer ways. The classic one is cross-play, why would the market-leader allow cross-play giving access to their large player-base to their competition. We almost need this back-and-forth in the market to ensure competition.
The whole industry is hellbent on a race to the bottom, with the exception of a few companies who release extremely high quality content once every 5-10 years. I would say that I’m less of a gamer today because of so many disappointing letdowns from groups like Activision. I’m honestly surprised that this is more of a problem than purchasing Bethesda or Obsidian. The court case basically only focused on COD - what about the rest of Activision’s massive IP portfolio?? It just seemed like an afterthought in comparison.