I feel like Microsoft is just scraping the bottom of the barrel at this point in this whole ordeal. This acquisition is not a good thing, anyone who thinks so is not looking at the big picture. Look past cod on game pass for a couple of minutes and realize what they really wanted.

They want full control of the cloud gaming market. If Microsoft purchases Acti-Blizz then they own the largest game publishing business in NA. They would capture the phone market with xcloud and King mobile games, the console market with game pass, the cloud market with xcloud and azure, every Windows laptop on the planet is now an Xbox console thanks to xcloud. They would lock out competition and force other cloud providers into contracts with unreasonable stipulations like the geforce now agreement.

They did the same thing with inXile and obsidian, the two biggest Linux supporting developers in the industry and now none of their games will have Linux ports like wasteland 2 and 3 or the pillars of eternity series. Valve made the right moves with steam play and proton, instead of their “walled garden” idea Microsoft had, now they’re just buying up the competition because they can’t realistically compete now that proton is damn near performance parity to native Windows. It’s just sad how low Microsoft is willing to go to be the top dog.