What's wrong with people liking consolidation soo much and excuse it as normal. Ofc companies can try but having hard laws against companies to push to far is super important. Hopefull it gets denied and we won't have another publisher bought by anyone should be the only answer.
Stop it with consolidation nonsense.
There's no fear consolidation with ABK deal.
There are stil plenty of 3rd party devs making quality AAA games plus how many games ABK is releasing normally?
Let me see COD, 1 or 2 Blizzard games every 4 to 5 years and candy crush? So this will lead to consolidation?
ABK deal will not lead to any consolidation-
I will post following reasons -
1 - Improves Gamepass value significantly. So more games for more people at cheap price. You will benefit from it as consumer and you can't deny it.
2 - ABK games under Activision only available on limited platform for 70 to 100$. Diablo 4 and many ABK games are not even on Steam and many other popular platforms.
MS wil bring all those games to Steam, Nintendo and different cloud services. So more players will play Activision games under MS. Phill said it under Oath. There were no similar promises or legal agreements for Bethesda games.
3 - Gives players options. You can buy for 70$ or try it through Gamepass. Play on your pc or phone or console natively. How this is bad or leads to consolidation.?
4 - More competition in mobile gaming market. Google and Apple control mobile market. MS can enter into that market thanks to King. How this leads to consolidation?
5 - Xbox position gets stronger in console market which will force Sony to compete harder which will result in better deals and quality games for gamers at affordable prices. Competition is good?
6 - Activision employees wanted to unionised. MS openly supported it. So under MS, ABK workers can unioniose and will get much better and less toxic working condition compared to what they were getting under Bobby Kotick? This is good, right?
7 - Activision is sitting on many IPs which went dormant. MS talked about reviving those IPs and add to gamepass. Again good for gamers?
8 - Many devs are forced to work on CoD. Those devs might get opportunity to work new projects rather than working on CoD factory.
9 - End of Annualised CoD games. If i remember correctly, Phill said they might move away from Annualised COD games. I see it as good thing imo
And finally dont forget Activision wants to get bought, this not some Hostile take over. If not MS, someone else would have bought Activision IPs or some assets of the company.
Activision management wants to sell the company and their shareholders and all agreed to acquisition. No one opposing the deal except Sony, FTC and CMA. Over 50 countries approved the deal including EU. Most regulators publicily said we don't think this will let to consolidation. So how come you came to this conclusion this will lead to consolidation?
You know whats good example of consolidation? Disney. They acquired Marvel,fox, star wars and many other popular media houses and they release content exclusively to their subscription service afaik. MS not gonna do it incase of ABK, its pretty clear now thanks to court case. There is no good evidence out there which proves this leads to consolidation.