Microsoft wins FTC fight to buy Activision Blizzard
https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/11/23779039/microsoft-activision-blizzard-ftc-trial-win
From the article, quoting Judge Corley:
… the Court finds the FTC has not shown a likelihood it will prevail on its claim this particular vertical merger in this specific industry may substantially lessen competition. To the contrary, the record evidence points to more consumer access to Call of Duty and other Activision content. The motion for a preliminary injunction is therefore DENIED.
Only a handful of games and only after they are several years old. But not the whole franchise, so unless you have a PlayStation or had one in the past and played the other games in the franchise, you may be missing too much story to understand what’s going on.
Other than Spider-Man, it really feels like Sony coming out with games on PC is just to get you to buy a PlayStation to finish the franchise. Almost like a demo.
I appreciate what Sony has done, and I had a ton of fun playing Horizon Zero Dawn and Spider-Man, but as much as I want to play Uncharted, people tell me that I just can’t start from the end of that series. And I don’t really feel motivated to get God of War knowing they may wait 5+ years to put Valhalla on PC.
Yeah, Sony still is very much focused on pushing people to proprietary hardware. I’m glad they changed in some aspects as they saw the lost market potential of letting Microsoft dominate in the PC area. But, it is telling that if Sony bought a studio my first worry would be about games no longer being released day 1 on PC whereas that worry doesn’t exist for Microsoft. So Sony has improvements to make.
Destiny is the only game Sony has bought of note ever, and it’s not going exclusive, nor is Bungies next game. Sony buys talent, not game libraries.
Not to mention their PC titles have all been pretty bad ports.
At least they seem to be committed to fixing them. But yeah, with the reputation they have made for themselves, I definitely wouldn’t get any of their games at launch without reading lots of reviews. I did pick up Spider-Man at launch because the reviews seemed good, and I thought it was pretty damn solid of a port at launch. I wanted to get TLOU at launch, as I have never been able to play that game. But apparently it was a complete dumpster fire. I guess it has already improved a lot, but I already moved on to other games. I’ll get it when it goes on sale.