I was laughing at the onion article and stopped- was that really published in 1998 ?!?!? Or is the date also a joke?

It's hard to block mergers based on a company involved being a monopoly if none of the companies involved are monopolies or will become monopolies.

Regulators have to come up with a different set of rules to block "large but not monopolistic mergers" without also just effectively protecting the actual leader in a given industry from competition.

They can't even manage to beat Steam on their own OS to be fair lol

Consoles are walled-gardens altogether. Also poor Sony set the markt rules with their 3rd-party exclusives for how many generations now?

If you want to keep gaming as far away from enshittificarion as possible, then set up a linux gaming pc. It's not bad anymore.

We are so far away from that being even possible, let alone likely. Even Valve has successfully decoupled about 95% of PC gaming from Microsoft.

Big corpo is bad but Microsoft is far behind in the console space and in the gaming pc front. They won't extinguish playstation anytime soon.

Whilst monopolies are a terrible thing for consumers.

PlayStation and Nintendo still have the best first party lineups and IP available to them. I don’t think this is as big of a deal as people would like to make it seem.

I do agree this should have been blocked by regulators just as I thought with the Bethesda acquisition. Sony also with the acquisition of Bungie.

There should be a restriction on the purchasing of studios/publishers of a certain size.

Certainly isn’t going to hurt Sony or Nintendo. I also don’t think this is the big WIN that Microsoft thinks it’s going to be either.

Especially Bobby and all the ones he enabled

the government was desperate for a post brexit trade deal

Kotick is out in January at the very least. I think there is a 60 day waiting period before employees can begin unionizing, as part of the deal.

It looks like Kotick will be leaving after the transition so that's a great start. My dream is that this all somehow leads to the full Overwatch PvE campaign coming back onto the table again (given that their attempts to provide long-term replay ability without doing the work seem to be floundering now, there's a chance right?)