Woah. I guess that is one way to clean house of the absolutely shit and toxic management.

68 billion!

Call of Duty being an MS exclusive would kill Playstation.

I think I need to buy an Xbox for the Diablo games...

The only upside of this news I can think of is that maybe Activision can go back to putting out games other than Call of Duty.

This is a huge blow to Sony. I'm not sure what they can do now to "even" the field. Those are huge franchises that Microsoft will be acquiring. For selfish reason, this also sucks for me since I have only been a Playstation player and now I may have to buy another console.

I think a big franchise like CoD would probably still hit Playstation, but Microsoft would dangle the "Play it on Game Pass" carrot.

At least I hope they do, otherwise it kind of seems borderline monopolistic with all the big acquisitions lately.

Definitely monopoly vibes going at this point, but our government believes bigger is better these days.

Generally, I don't like this. But if they boot Kotick and have a stronger push for smaller games, then it could be good.

If this is true then this is not a good step…

Lol

Strangely, one of the first things to jump out at me was that Candy Crush was important enough to list on the banner graphic with the announcement. I played that for a while back around 10 years ago and figured it was probably pretty dead by now. So I googled it and saw that it currently makes over $1 billion/year. To me, that's more shocking than the acquisition.



Disney bought Fox and no one batted a damn eye and that was a way bigger deal over this.

I have all 3 next gen consoles, but play my PS5 and Switch the most. This stinks as I prefer the Dualsense controller over the Xbox one, but oh well.

Sony really is lagging behind at this point with what MS is doing. They need to launch their "GamePass" ASAP

Tons of people criticized the Disney/Fox deal for years (between announcement, closing, and since) and it had to get antitrust approval.

Somewhat surprisingly, this deal cost $16 billion more than the Disney/Fox deal.

Do you think they will come right out and say he is gone? I don't think they would. My guess is once MS has the keys, they clean house.

His deal expires March 2023. I am absolutely willing to bet he is gone immediately once the deal closes.

This is fully what I expect in most of these corporate buyout scenarios, let alone one where the current guy in charge is an issue. The deal isn't done until the deal is done, so there's no way they just boot the guy until then.

Yes, he's going to get a massive payout, and he'll never have to work another day in his life. But that was bound to happen anyway, whether it was him resigning, getting canned, or whatever, at any point in his future. But if/when he's out, he's out for good.

Agreed. CoD has a huge player base - MS would cut the player base in half if they made it exclusive.
I'm sure there'll be other games that they'll make exclusive though.

I think this is more to do with making Game Pass the definitive Netflix of videogames.

This still has MS as the 3rd biggest gaming entity behind Tencent and Sony.

This would be the only good thing - the ability to let some games just be small games.


But not dumping Kotick and of course the whole monopoly thing are all Very Bad Things™.

Did the government even weigh on on antitrust? I never heard one word about this merger until it's official? The Fox-Disney thing was in limbo for over a year before it went official.

The process starts now. They've said they expect it to take 12-18 months (FY2023)

This was just announced today so they basically have a year to year and a half to decide.

I'm not really knowledgeable in US Antitrust matters but if the government did not step in for the Disney/Fox merger, what are the chances this get denied?