Microsoft's Activision move proves the competition is no longer Sony, it's something much bigger
Microsoft's proposed takeover of Activision Blizzard is currently the black hole that is, if not all-consuming, at least altering the reality of other news in the gaming space. The event horizon that's affecting all else. Even if a news story is unrelated, its specter looms.
It feels like something has changed. The way the industry worked, the size of all the players, the divisions, the interplay between major publishers and console manufacturers, it was all reliable. Predictable.
The conversations that were had were cyclical because as much as time went on and releases came and went, the players on the board had remained in their relative positions this side of the century.
After Tuesday, it doesn't feel like that anymore. The conversation has become way bigger. These aren't just considerations about consoles or game releases, but more about companies who are trying to shape the way we experience our world.
Like a bad Pokemon metaphor, in the space of a couple of days, it feels the scale of what we talk about in games evolved.
Yet, despite the magnitude of this paradigm shift, so much of the early consumer conversation is still marred down in the old. Nowhere else is that felt more than in the trenches of the 'console war'.
It only takes a brief trip to the comments on one of the big publisher's tweets to see the vitriol that is still slung between Xbox and PlayStation devout.
However, the zoom of our scope feels so much wider than before. In days of old, who was selling the most consoles was the be-all and end-all of the conversation.
It's a metric that Sony still seems to place a lot of weight in with their gaming market being entirely tied to their hardware. They've experimented with putting older releases on PC
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