Microsoft might have purchased someone, maybe

I suspect, much like walking back on the nonsense that GP doesn't impact sales of the titles on it, there's a fair amount of hidden costs and long-term issues that they're just bankrolling and hoping to solve later to get the thing to be where they want it.

So those first party games on PS Plus aren't first party?

Sorry let me rephrase that, why do Sony or Microsoft or Nintendo have exclusives at all? It's anti competitive.

This thread is awful.

I'm in total agreement.

Sony pay to block games from going on GP.

Being predominantly a Nintendo fan all these years, this deal means nothing to me. Nintendo rarely sees Activision games, let alone Bethesda, EA and Ubisoft, and yet there is a huge pool of games to play.

Sony will lose little from this. They have in place a consistent, if slow, schedule of major 1st party games. They could easily find a developer that could fill the Call of Duty void, and do a great job, if it ever disappeared from Playstation.

I've got all three machines and I like them all, game pass is great, Nintendo still have that magic they've always had and Sony make awesome first party titles that now seemingly work perfectly with TV and film.

Having said that, I do worry about how this may tip the scales too much in favour of the other. I hope it doesn't, as we will all suffer, even those who are saying they are xbox lifers. GP won't stay cheap forever.

I think in the interest of fairness, let Microsoft have Activision, make it so that COD has to be made available on all platforms.

Problem solved?

I do admit I have a soft spot for Sony and to a slightly lesser extent Nintendo purely due to them being part of my formative years in gaming.

I will go with which ever company fucks me in the ass the least. So last gen ms tried to do the camera crap and you couldn't share games and it was like £80 more than the PS4. Sony did none of that and was cheaper. So I bought a PS4 after loving my 360. This gen Sony tried the no lube techniques on me in many ways but especially in pure cash terms so I went gp. Yeah they all annoying and I hate a lot of Nintendo's policy's but currently ms charge me about £1 a week and give me more games than I have time to play. Including currently the amazing wo long.

Its like when EA Play being a part of the sub. I dont think I have played a single one of their games other than It Takes Two (which is great).

BITCHPLEASEX

Why? It’s effectively just outsourcing. Whether they own the studio or pay them for the product seems an arbitrary line.

I think I've said this before but I'm torn between thinking large-scale mergers are generally to be frowned upon because they can stifle competition and often result in job losses (see Disney buying Fox) and thinking this particular merger is probably, on the whole, a good thing, at the very least for Activision devs.

The corporate culture and management over there are dreadful and morale is in the floor. MS actually has a good reputation in these areas and will almost certainly improve all these aspects. Plus they're far more likely to revive dormant brands within Activision, bring back beloved franchises, and will probably end up broadening the audience of a lot of their games through PC Game Pass and cloud streaming. And if MS didn't buy them, some other trillion-dollar company may very well do it instead, and they might not be quite as gamer-centric as Xbox usually is (these days).

Are there concerns? Of course there are, and MS guaranteeing platform parity for a decade is a good remedy. Will it hurt Sony's bottom line? Almost certainly, but I doubt it'll shake them from their position at the top of the gaming tree, or even really knock too much off their market share. Where it might give MS undue dominance is in cloud and mobile, but it's equally likely that they won't really be able to make major inroads there given their previous form.

So, yeah, I just think on balance this is a merger that might actually do some good, even though I share a lot of concerns about mega-mergers in general.