Not a fan of market consolidation. It’s bad for the consumer at the end of the day.
But if I were to look for a silver lining: 1 More quality Gamepass content and 2 Maybe MS can save Blizzard from itself.
I look forward to 5-10 years from now when the people who were kids now start pointing to this acquisition as the negative “turning point” for Blizzard because they liked Overwatch 2.
I don’t think the kids are that dumb
As somebody who has spent years and years working for ABK and Xbox, my prediction is this integration will be hardest for King.
How so? I remember King being a primary target of the acquisition
AB and Xbox are both North American corporate culture companies, for better or worse. King is very much a Swedish company, and spends a lot of time on the softer side of management.
King was already struggling fitting into AB culture. That work-24/7, Drive for Success™️, I-read-six-books-week-and-get-up-at-4-am-to-exercise culture will now be driven up to 11.
To be fair to Microsoft… Mojang has seemingly been doing gret as another Swedish company under their roof. This might actually be a reprieve from Activision Blizzard management?
100% Xbox is better lead than AB and Phil Spencer is an awesome person and an awesome leader. So in that respect there might be more time for King post-acquisition. But let’s wait and see
I’m not sure why people are expecting Microsoft to act altruistically in this merger. They’re a publicly traded company that exists to create profit for their shareholders, and they’re not going to do a single thing that won’t increase their profits.
Mergers like this are always bad for the consumer, and the FTC is betraying the citizens by letting it happen.
Mergers like this are always bad for the consumer
Microsoft’s acquisitions of Github and LinkedIn both worked out pretty well.
Github actually has more free features now than it did before the Microsoft acquisition - they made some paid features free (like the ability to have private repos) and added a lot of new free features (like Github Actions which is built on Azure), without removing or paywalling any existing free features. Github likely wouldn’t have been able to afford that investment without Microsoft.
They also use GitHub to hover up code and resell it as AI… and it’s only a question of time before they do a rugpull.
Make no mistake, they bought both for access to the data and use it daily to upend other competitors.
Remember: embrace, expand, extinguish…
They also use GitHub to hover up code and resell it as AI
Microsoft’s not the only company doing this. Pretty much all code-focused AI models are based on Github data.
Remember: embrace, expand, extinguish…
This may have been common in the 90s, but I’m not sure it’s still relevant. Do you have any examples of Microsoft doing this in the past 10 years?
Mergers like this are always bad for the consumer
This is not true. Horizontal mergers are always bad for the consumer. Vertical mergers, like this one, can either be good or bad or neither. In many other cases they have been a net benefit to consumers and actually increased competition
No one is expecting Microsoft to act altruistically. We are expecting them to rake in more cash, especially from King, and invest that cash in games, gamepass, and actual competition to Sony and Nintendo. We are expecting them to make smart business decisions and, SHOCKER, there are smart business decisions available to them that are also beneficial to consumers
No company is your friend. But a smart company finds ways to make money off you while still leaving you happy and content after
How is a games publisher buying another games publisher not horizontal integration?
Activision Blizzard is such an awful company that I stopped playing their games, for ethical reasons. I’m no fan of Microsoft or consolidation, but at least they don’t have a habit of supporting human rights abuses. This acqisition has me considering playing (ex-)Blizzard games again.
Vertical mergers, like this one, can either be good
Do you have any examples?
