Of course they are. Why allow a company who are of one of the biggest third party publishers join Microsoft when they already took Bethesda off the market, started making their games exclusive and have already stated that going forwards their titles may not be available on other platforms.
Especially when Sony are partly responsible for the original success of Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon. Everyone is so focused on Call of Duty that they're missing the bigger picture. It's not just A and Call of Duty they're buying but it's B, K and everything they own too.
I do not want consolidation to destroy this market because believe me I can see it. Nintendo and Sony could never afford to finance this deal, that's partly why I think it's unfair. I wouldn't actually want any deal to happen in the first place. It's like buying up all the land to stop your enemies doing it first. There's only so much land and compared to Microsoft, the yearly profit, earnings and value of Sony and Nintendo are a stone in the ocean.
Microsoft already monopolise certain industries. They're consistently in anti trust court. They aren't your friend, they aren't doing you a favour. They're a business trying to succeed by any means necessary. Yesterday it's Bethesda. Today is ABK. And then what is next Ubisoft? Embracer? 2K or or another major publisher tomorrow? It's not sustainable. Like game pass. It's not sustainable forever in it's current form without compromise and that could be the quality of the service, increasing subscribers or increasing the cost of the service. Their aim obviously is to increase subscribers. That's part of why this deal is happening.
This has so many effects outside of the little bubble people are focused on between Call of Duty and Microsoft that they miss everything else. Yes, Sony make a great deal of money from that franchise, Sony have also put a great deal of money in that franchise because these agreements they have, like the one Microsoft had with CoD before Sony cost money. Microsoft want that money. It'll hurt their competitors business and be a huge boon for theirs. Allowing this deal to go through sets a presidence for the wider industry that could hurt the industry entirely. Just because a lot of these companies aren't taking up the picket signs and protesting in their offices doesn't mean they truly agree with it. That's just the nature of PR. Look at Google the two faced fucks. Said they have no issue with the ABK deal when they clearly do, said they didn't because they probably knew they were shutting Stadia down and they cited the Bethesda acquisition as a factor that moved them to closing the service down.
The only logical recourse I can see from there is Sony to acquire 2K and use GTA as a bargaining chip. But I'd rather these big publishers weren't acquired at all. I would rather Bethesda, Activision and Bungie were independent and Microsoft used the studios they've acquired for some time to develop some great franchises but they haven't even been given time to do that before these big deals have gone through.
Whatever happens, the truth is Activision's owners stands to make incredible amounts of money. They would be stupid to fight this deal. I'm under no illusion whatsoever that when this deal is concluded because it will conclude. Microsoft have the money and influence to make this happen, that I will inevitably have to end up buying games from franchises I love on other platforms because they won't be available on my preferred choice of platform that is my only and preferable way to play. I got bills and a family to feed. I can't afford another console and ecosystem.
I'm gonna play devil's advocate here and say that while I 100% understand where you're coming from and agree with a lot of what you're saying here...honestly I
don't see any issue with needing multiple consoles to play the widest breadth of games. In that sense I don't see anything "wrong" per se with Microsoft making content they acquire exclusive to their platform. People have had to buy multiple consoles since the 16-bit era to play as many exclusives as possible, it's nothing new and I don't see that being a compelling reason to argue against the acquisition. Plus, I still think at some level, people do go where the games they want are. We saw it happen when FF and tons of once-SNES Japanese devs ditched Nintendo and went with Sony on the PS1. We saw it when quite a few Western devs chose 360 over the PS3, and we saw it happen again when Sony both made and co-funded the better exclusives of the 8th-gen.
However (and this is where it starts getting more nuanced), I
DO think companies attempting to create that type of exclusive ecosystem through acquisitions should be challenged and shut down on the attempt if they're showing a pattern of rapidly consolidating independent studios & publishers in the industry. That's where I think valid arguments against M&As come into the picture. Since 2018 MS have acquired multiple independent studios and a large, notable publisher. Then only 8 months after that publisher's deal was finalized, they announced an attempt to acquire an even
LARGER publisher. The worst part IMO is that since 2018, we have seen very little results of these acquisitions where MS can actually be said was involved innately in the development of the games, or results that clearly demonstrate games which could only exist through the result of the acquisition. In fact some of the only examples bordering on those metrics turned out to be absolute failures, such as Bleeding Edge.
There's also an issue I have (you aren't making the following argument, obviously; I'm just tying it in to an overall view of the matter) with people who may look at someone saying "I don't have an inherent problem with games being exclusive to a system to the point you need multiple consoles to play these games." and then try equivalating what Microsoft are doing, with how Sony got into gaming. Sorry but the two situations aren't the same. Sony bought Psygnosis in 1993, but Psygnosis was no ABK in terms of market value and it was Sony's first time as a platform holder; such a move could be considered expected. They didn't buy another publisher until Bungie in 2022, over 25 years later, and it's difficult to really consider Bungie a publisher in the traditional sense given they only make a single game and ABK were publishing Destiny until very recently. Also the market conditions of how Sony gained so much 3P support with the PS1 were all down to Sony providing a superior comprehensive business & design platform/model for gamers, developers and publishers over Nintendo and Sega. They didn't really need to do much to convince devs like Square or Namco to choose PS1 over Saturn & N64; shortcomings of the other two platforms made the choice very easy by and large.
There is no scenario where someone can point to PS5 and say Sony has shortcomings in their business model or the console itself that would naturally engender developers or publishers to choose Microsoft for offering a superior model. That is a massive difference between PS5/Xbox Series gen and PS1/Saturn/N64 gen or even PS2/DC/Xbox/GC gen. Meaning the only way Microsoft can get various 3P content as exclusive to their platform is through something other than the merit of Xbox's own design or proven revenue model in the games market: MS's non-gaming money. And it's been that non-gaming money which has been keeping the division going for the past several years. By contrast, yes Sony took some funds aside from PS to fund PS1, but that was out of necessity because the PS side simply didn't exist prior to PS1, and Sony's plans in case PS1 could not pull its own weight, were naturally going to be to shutter the branch altogether and leave gaming behind. They almost did this with the PS3 when the whole company was in financial jeopardy, but I think people who draw false equivalence between Sony's early funding of PlayStation and how Microsoft are trying to fund Xbox now don't keep that obvious point in mind.
They want to think Sony would have continued pilfering money from their other divisions towards PlayStation in the event the PS1 never took off, when that simply wasn't the case. Panasonic/Matsushita were about as big as Sony at the time, and they got rid of 3DO fast when that wasn't pulling its own weight. NEC, similarly big back then, did the same with their gaming division after PC-FX completely bombed. I think that's actually a core philosophical difference between Japanese tech companies and Western big tech companies IMO; the former seem much less willing to have loss-leading units operate in near-perpetuity just to create a "possible" opportunity for another section of the company that is actually pulling its own weight and could see massive growth is the failing side just "sticks around" long enough.
