Hard not to see this as an escape hatch for current Activision leadership facing a state investigation/suit and a spark of labor organizing
But I don’t write for Bloomberg, so
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right? like, I can’t imagine how thrilled they are
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Even Microsoft’s cleanup detail on the California issue are dusting their hands off after handing out golden parachutes
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i think the logic is actually pretty simple – “any microsoft acquisition just adds more value to gamepass, a service i’m already paying for”. i don’t think it’s any deeper than that.
gamepass has 25 million subscribers.
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It also seems like the overlap between “dislikes Actiblizz IP” and “dislikes Game Pass” is strong whereas the inverse/obverse positions are more scattered. Hence tendency to apathy among strongest would-be consumer objectors
Within the industry I guess it’s reluctance to bite the hand that feeds
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It’s also just way easier to project the pros/cons of short-term strategic gain to Microsoft than it is to make out the long-term impacts of consolidation of power on the consumer (I should be saying “and industry” here but let’s be honest, most people out there don’t care about anyone but themselves)
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What I’m seeing among friends is like movie industry – it’s unclear whether this is bad for the people working for Activision or looking to pitch projects, clear that consolidation is bad longterm, but only a very small proportion of people are directly operating in a space where consolidation affects them. A lot of the loudest voices are the ones already marginalized and outside the system.
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The Game Pass growth cheerleaders are totally analogous to Valve’s… “fandom” demanding everything release on Steam if it’s on PC. A little convenience and frugality turned them into a PR apparatus even if Valve’s business was ultimately no more benevolent than Origin or GOG.
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it was actually a little more benevolent, they did a lot of cool extraneous cross platform desktop dev, and I do think it’s weird that people keep forgetting to take this into account vs Epic, whose tooling is never going to be anything but godawful
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it’ll be so cool when games pass is at 100 millions subs and has fewer games than ever and anything made exclusively for it is flavorless mush
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Overstated the case a bit but I think those B2B offerings were perhaps not worth the cut and probably not drivers of the consumer froth — that’s all fanboying imo, Origin was fine.
I’m mostly thinking of Battlefield and Titanfall fwiw. Can’t imagine not bothering with a game solely because of the launcher on PC
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that’s the end game for all streaming services!! i lov eit!!! i love to live in a world of garbage and mush!!!
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Comically, the counter-argument to this is that there are too many launchers, as illustrated by Microsoft now owning three of them. Just let me have the games without the launcher please
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Yeah. 'launch THIS MS.
I have a copy of Wolfenstein Young Blood stranded on something called the Bethesda Launcher, which I don’t even know if it exists still or not.
That’s fine, though personally I’ve found one-off installs more annoying.
I’m thinking of Steam users who are very much into online DRM launchers, just one in particular.
Imagining someone proud of Friends being on Netflix and that person doesn’t exist because video games are uniquely terrible
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fyi i do think those people exist (or at least they did when Friends was on Netflix), at least judging by twitter. lol. the fandom for random companies and platforms that have always been prevalent in games has definitely made its way into all culture at this point.
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oh no
hey how big brain is Microsoft “helping” Epic out with a totally unrelated lawsuit about defining the videogame market for monopoly analysis as broadly as possible in this light
whistling, shuffling, looking around
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God, can’t wait to have to consult Justplay to figure out where I can play a game.
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