... the Court finds the FTC has not shown a likelihood it will prevail on its claim this particular vertical merger in this specific industry may substantially lessen competition. To the contrary, the record evidence points to more consumer access to Call of Duty and other Activision content. The motion for a preliminary injunction is therefore DENIED.
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
For me it was how scary the game got a few levels in. The probe droids with the deserted homes where you get ambushed, oof. Had to have my dad play through those levels while I watched, but he didn’t know where to go so I eventually had to gather the courage to do it myself!
I was always a Nintendo/PC gamer. I made the move the week my Steam Deck shipped (Q3er). I hacked my launch switch and dumped all my my switch games that I didn't own but were available on PC (for example, DOOM 2016 was skipped but Daemon X Machina was not). I have those dumped games backed up on my computer, but I just have them all on an SD card for the Steam Deck!
Mostly everything I've tried has run pretty much perfectly. A while ago Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 had some pretty major texture issues but within the last few months there were some major strides for switch emulation and that seems to have effectively solved a majority of the issues I had run into with the games.
I'm now most of the way through MUA3 on the Steam Deck :) I've also got the trilogy all one one console :) format shifting, library consolidation, that's what the Steam Deck is all about!
I used the hacked switch for a little while, there are some interesting things it can accomplish but it hasn't been used at all since then. Even before the Steam Deck I had just hardly been using it, and now having the ability to make any control scheme I want make it the easy choice every time.
The Steam Deck is incredible but it's the Steam Input API that convinced me with the Steam Controller it was worth it.
I wonder what the metric for PC gaming is. When I was 10-16 I was definitely a Nintendo and PC gamer, but the "PC games" I was playing was flash games on Kongregate. It wasn't until I was 15 or 16 that I made my Steam account which was on the family 2010 MacBook pro, relegated to titles supported by SteamPlay (Linux and OSX compatible titles).
For purposes of the article, I'd have been a statistic reporting under both, despite never knowing that PC gaming hardware was a thing back then.
Of course, it's a different story if it's built/bought a computer for gaming and also a console in addition.
I think one other thing to keep in mind is products are gathered over time. A PC gamer may buy a console a few years after they've had their PC, and vice versa for the console owner.
What is your favorite pre-EA Star Wars game?
Personally it would be Republic Commando - the books were good too, but I just want a sequel!
Will there be AI accelerator cards in the future of gaming PCs?
Hi there, I want to share some thoughts and want to hear your opinions on it....
Study: 47% of gamers play on multiple platforms (www.gamesindustry.biz)