Microsoft Buying Activision/Blizzard

More important video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QB_57n_Gk8Q

After all, the only video you should really watch is to be found on G+G right?  ;)

And is that a good thing?

Instead of having them adapt the game to be used on your platform, you BUY-UP the company?

Or is this all part of the creation of a monopoly by not allowing such blockbuster games on other platforms, forcing people to use your system ONLY to play those games?

I think this is BAD for competition and a free market.

I understand your “trepidation” to the development, however…  The software already ran on the MS platforms, they already had a very tight relationship with Microsoft and the cloud technology, MS tech will allow you to run the game on nearly anything as long as the platform in question allows it to happen.  There are some issues with the recent advent of “streaming games” such as the micro-transaction aspect is not allowed to run on several platforms unless that company gets a cut of each transaction (Apple does this, Google does this, etc…) so many titles that have such a component have ended up with a “dead end” in the program…    Open the store to get that new “skin” for your character and find out the store either doesn’t exist or simply won’t let you make your purchase.  This will most likely be the biggest problem going forward for some of the games at Activision (and Microsoft has already run in to this problem with their own games).

In terms of competition and free market…  What we have currently are companies that *must* obtain some exclusive license to a title or they lose in the market.  There is no escaping this fact and it has been this way for longer than the XBox and PlayStation have been around.  This is something that has been around since at least the early 1990’s on computers.  (there was PC, there was Apple then Mac, there was NeXT, there was… and so on…  Yes, exclusive deals were a thing on those platforms as well for gaming and general productivity software)  Accepting this as the premise for what we have going on now with this purchase, what is the “lesser of two evils” in all this?

Sony has had many software titles that you *HAD* to have their console to play/use.  Arguably worse, you had to have a specific version of the console for things to run.  They have also had the habit of selling you a new console then having you pay for the same titles all over again to continue being able to play them on the new hardware.  Microsoft, until recently, had the same issue…  Then came all the clamor about “backward compatibility”…  Sony said it was a waste of time on numerous occasions over a long period of time (IE:  who wants to play that old game/software kind of comments often repeated) but Microsoft did provide a large library of older titles that work on hardware from the original XBox One to the new Series S/X and I think the consumer market has enjoyed this aspect as it has progressed.  Sony, on the other hand, has fought tooth and nail against even allowing any of their stuff to be ported to any other hardware and only recently are we seeing a few select titles coming to PC.  Compare that to MS which is allowing the titles to be streamed over what is essentially a web interface.

From my perspective, MS is the lesser of two evils when it comes to outcome.  Only time will tell.