I think everyone saying market consolidation is bad is missing the point for this particular one.
This isn’t Google buying and killing another product. This isn’t AT&T buying and merging something. This is the failed company Activision that bought Blizzard and tarnished its name and branding once again being sold off.
What’s more, this is (effectively) the death of Activision. The bane on gaming since it first started mouthing syllables to the words “corporate profits”.
I can only really see this as a good thing from pretty much any angle you try to look at it from. The fact that the only thing all the comments here have to say is that “consolidation bad” should be very telling. I’m no fan of Microsoft, but they generally let departments have a vision and execute them. They seem to have less awful stories than most tech cultures, so one would imagine that going from managers who don’t care or are actively participating in hazing you to a place where you are given the space to foster your creative ideas… I’m gonna say this consolidation is probably a good thing if only because of the small chance that the workplace culture changes. In regards to the company, there may even finally be a litany of IP have a chance of seeing the light of day again!
Time will tell of course but I’d say all you need to do is read the timeline. The last decade has been nothing but awful actions from Blizzard leading up to the buyout, ranging from people doing multiple different boycotts against them for Blitzchang to their now parent company Activision just going full 1970. Microsoft will never be a golden pinnacle of perfection but they haven’t been fostering workplaces where people feel fear and have their freaking bodily fluids stolen.
I guess I’ll put it this way. Would you rather have the execs behind CoD and WoW or would you rather have the execs behind Halo and Starfield?
Both suck but one is clearly trying to allow space for heart to exist while having lots of skeletons and decomposing corpses in the closet while the other is whipping its junk out and rubbing it in your face while laughing about making skeletons… too much? lol