this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2023

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Microsoft completes Activision Blizzard acquisition, Call of Duty now part of Xbox (www.theverge.com)

submitted 3 years ago by throws_lemy@lemmy.nz to c/technology@beehaw.org

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[–] thepianistfroggollum@lemmynsfw.com 40 points 3 years ago (14 children)

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.

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[–] pb7280@lemmy.fucs.io 14 points 3 years ago (5 children)

Mergers like this are always bad for the consumer

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

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[–] Stillhart@lemm.ee 9 points 3 years ago

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.

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[–] falsem@kbin.social 6 points 3 years ago (2 children)

How is a games publisher buying another games publisher not horizontal integration?

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[–] Seasoned_Greetings@lemm.ee 4 points 3 years ago (1 child)

Microsoft is not primarily a game publisher. They develop the thing the games run on, while they also own other studios that publish and develop games.

That's vertical integration for a company that also happens to own other vertically integrated assets. Not horizontal just because other game publishers exist under Microsoft.

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[–] pb7280@lemmy.fucs.io 2 points 3 years ago

Yes exactly. It's obvious when you compare the pre-merger relationship between Microsoft and ABK to, say, the relationship between Microsoft and Sony. The latter is very competitive, whereas the former is more symbiotic

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[–] ono@lemmy.ca 6 points 3 years ago

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.

Vertical mergers, like this one, can either be good

Do you have any examples?

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[–] dan@upvote.au 5 points 3 years ago (3 children)

Mergers like this are always bad for the consumer

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.

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[–] taanegl@beehaw.org 9 points 3 years ago (2 children)

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...

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[–] dan@upvote.au 4 points 3 years ago (1 child)

They also use GitHub to hover up code and resell it as AI

Microsoft's not the only company doing this. Pretty much all code-focused AI models are based on Github data.

Remember: embrace, expand, extinguish...

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?

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[–] Chinzon@beehaw.org 2 points 3 years ago

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

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[–] ultratiem@lemmy.ca 5 points 3 years ago (1 child)

I’m sorry there were people expecting Microsoft to act altruistically??

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[–] thepianistfroggollum@lemmynsfw.com 1 point 3 years ago

Yes? At the time of my comment all of the other comments were people hoping it would be a good thing.

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[–] Rentlar@beehaw.org 3 points 3 years ago (1 child)

It's been so long since proper new Starcraft content (not including the basic remaster) I am almost at the point where I might take a wallet-sucking lootbox and microtransaction infested nightmare of a mobile app game if it means new lore for Starcraft, over nothing.

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[–] Prouvaire@kbin.social 5 points 3 years ago

Stormgate and ZeroSpace are looking like the spiritual successors to Starcraft, with the former developed largely by ex-Blizzard staff and the latter by some prominent members of the Starcraft community.

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