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Microsoft completes Activision Blizzard acquisition, Call of Duty now part of Xbox
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2023
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Technology
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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.
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
Exactly. If this weren't the case, companies wouldn't exist in the first place.
That said, MS has historically been pretty anti-competitive and monopolistic so I don't see any reason to expect that to change. But I think that even at their worst, this isn't going to be as bad as people are making it out to be. Playstation won't go away because of this. Playstation is already worse than Xbox in almost every way, they're just coasting right now. People will point to this merger as a turning point for PS but I think that ignores where PS is already at.
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.
Do you have any examples?
I’m sorry there were people expecting Microsoft to act altruistically??
Yes? At the time of my comment all of the other comments were people hoping it would be a good thing.
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...
Microsoft's not the only company doing this. Pretty much all code-focused AI models are based on Github data.
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?
Regardless at the end of the day microsoft is a business. By that fact alone their decisions are dependent on what is best for the company. If and when this deviates from what is best for the consumers, we will learn to regret the acquisition