Sony and Microsoft's Arms Race is Only Going to Heat Up

gamerant.com:

The ninth generation of gaming has brought plenty of advancements and new trends. The phasing out of HDDs in favor of zippy SSDs has all but eliminated loading times, while the rising popularity of VR gaming expands the horizons of what video games can aspire to be. Cloud gaming is also becoming increasingly mainstream, threatening to make physical media and home consoles less necessary in the near future. While gamers navigate all these rapid changes, they also have to make sense of the recent wave of studio acquisitions by Microsoft and Sony.

In but a few months, both Microsoft and Sony have expanded their stable of first-party studios. While some gamers are glad to see the two companies make big moves and breathe new life into studios, others are concerned that the consolidation of power will harm the gaming industry. Regardless of how gamers feel, it seems that neither Microsoft nor Sony are interested in slowing down any time soon.

How Sony's Acquisition of Bungie Stacks Up to Microsoft and Activision Blizzard

Since the launch of the Xbox Series X/S, Microsoft has not been shy about acquiring new studios. ZeniMax Media was acquired by Microsoft in March 2021. The acquisition puts Bethesda Softworks under Microsoft's umbrella, and with that plenty of popular franchises have now become the property of Microsoft, including Fallout and The Elder Scrolls. ZeniMax is also the parent company of Arkane Studios, Tango Gameworks, id Software, and MachineGames, which brings hit franchises such as Wolfenstein, Doom, The Evil Within, and Prey to the Xbox Game Studios family. The acquisition cost Microsoft a whopping $7.5 billion, and it was a significant event in the gaming industry not just because of the attached price tag, but