4 ms·

Honest question: Why do people think Microsoft buying Activision is bad?

Clubber 3y ago
Any consolidation leads to redundancies (job loss). Instead of 2 director/vp/svp's of marketing and all their reports and their reports, you just need 1. Apply that to most business areas (accounting, finance, tech, etc) in a company and it tends to push wages down across the board. Also, fewer competitors leads to a less interesting market. Imagine the NFL with just 4 teams. As far as Microsoft/Activision goes, it's potentially a good thing, but just because Activision was also made of acquisitions and drive for profit came at the cost of lower quality of their releases, IMO. Microsoft might reinvigorate Activision/Blizzard's IP.
- notfromhere 3y ago
  Fewer competitors also means fewer organizations to service for vendors. This has a huge long-term impact on the economy and local job markets as it means fewer firms being formed.
  - Clubber 3y ago
    That's a really good point. If you are a vendor, you can sell to mom and pops, grocery stores, Walmart, Amazon, Costco, etc. Once mom and pops are gone, you are limited to who you can sell to. When that happens, the people you can sell too have a lot more leverage against you. In terms of vendors, consolidation is like a black hole. The more consolidation, the bigger the black hole and the more vendors crushed by the gravity.
m463 3y ago
Robust competition leads to better products for customers, and better jobs for employees. The company will do meaningful work, have better pricing, and employees will have more customer focus and less office politics.
deleted 3y ago
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b0b10101 3y ago
because it will reduce competition (even if it's to the detriment of the consumer) - particularly when it comes to cloud gaming. msft is acquiring both horizontally (compared to their existing inhouse studios - notably their previous acquisition of zenimax/bethesda) and vertically (as activision/blizzard/king are the biggest developer of games for xbox and playstation). the plan is 2 fold: 1. short term - instead of competing with sony on securing exclusivity, ensure exclusivity by ownership 2. long term - bolster xbox cloud gaming by ensuring that every major game exists on the platform (ideally exclusively) the idea is that once you have a suprior catalog of games and a working subscription platform, you can boil your customers like frogs via price increases / ads / etc and that they will have no where to go because the games they want to play are exclusive to your service. with this acquisition msft is acquiring some of the most valuable ip in gaming, the development talent behind that api, and the audiences and communities that power it all and locking them down to xbox cloud gaming.
- ls612 3y ago
  Who cares about cloud gaming? I’m not trolling I’m serious I can’t see it becoming a real thing anytime soon, Google gave it a very good try and it flopped.
  - asterfield 3y ago
    At least for me - I never took stadia seriously because google was always going to cancel it. There’s no point investing energy in new google products. It may still be true that cloud gaming is not an interesting product, but google’s failure to enter it isn’t proof of that.
  - nullindividual 3y ago
    The next XBox refresh is rumored to lack an optical drive. So you buy your games from the Microsoft Store. Or download them from the Microsoft Store with a Gamepass subscription. That’s how you dominate “cloud” gaming— it becomes the only option you give customers to purchase games.

Any consolidation leads to redundancies (job loss). Instead of 2 director/vp/svp's of marketing and all their reports and their reports, you just need 1. Apply that to most business areas (accounting, finance, tech, etc) in a company and it tends to push wages down across the board. Also, fewer competitors leads to a less interesting market. Imagine the NFL with just 4 teams. As far as Microsoft/Activision goes, it's potentially a good thing, but just because Activision was also made of acquisitions and drive for profit came at the cost of lower quality of their releases, IMO. Microsoft might reinvigorate Activision/Blizzard's IP.

notfromhere 3y ago
Fewer competitors also means fewer organizations to service for vendors. This has a huge long-term impact on the economy and local job markets as it means fewer firms being formed.
- Clubber 3y ago
  That's a really good point. If you are a vendor, you can sell to mom and pops, grocery stores, Walmart, Amazon, Costco, etc. Once mom and pops are gone, you are limited to who you can sell to. When that happens, the people you can sell too have a lot more leverage against you. In terms of vendors, consolidation is like a black hole. The more consolidation, the bigger the black hole and the more vendors crushed by the gravity.

m463 3y ago

Robust competition leads to better products for customers, and better jobs for employees. The company will do meaningful work, have better pricing, and employees will have more customer focus and less office politics.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

b0b10101 3y ago

because it will reduce competition (even if it's to the detriment of the consumer) - particularly when it comes to cloud gaming. msft is acquiring both horizontally (compared to their existing inhouse studios - notably their previous acquisition of zenimax/bethesda) and vertically (as activision/blizzard/king are the biggest developer of games for xbox and playstation). the plan is 2 fold: 1. short term - instead of competing with sony on securing exclusivity, ensure exclusivity by ownership 2. long term - bolster xbox cloud gaming by ensuring that every major game exists on the platform (ideally exclusively) the idea is that once you have a suprior catalog of games and a working subscription platform, you can boil your customers like frogs via price increases / ads / etc and that they will have no where to go because the games they want to play are exclusive to your service. with this acquisition msft is acquiring some of the most valuable ip in gaming, the development talent behind that api, and the audiences and communities that power it all and locking them down to xbox cloud gaming.

ls612 3y ago
Who cares about cloud gaming? I’m not trolling I’m serious I can’t see it becoming a real thing anytime soon, Google gave it a very good try and it flopped.
- asterfield 3y ago
  At least for me - I never took stadia seriously because google was always going to cancel it. There’s no point investing energy in new google products. It may still be true that cloud gaming is not an interesting product, but google’s failure to enter it isn’t proof of that.
- nullindividual 3y ago
  The next XBox refresh is rumored to lack an optical drive. So you buy your games from the Microsoft Store. Or download them from the Microsoft Store with a Gamepass subscription. That’s how you dominate “cloud” gaming— it becomes the only option you give customers to purchase games.