With Activision, Microsoft is one gigantic step closer to game subscription dominance

theverge.com:

This weekend, I noticed that my PS5 and Switch were literally collecting dust — and realized that’s because I’ve been playing my games almost exclusively on Xbox Game Pass instead. The service has an incredible wealth of titles; in just the past couple weeks, I’ve finished Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, unpacked boxes in Unpacking, tried and failed to get invested in Mass Effect Legendary Edition, watched my wife deliver mail in Lake, and am currently living out my Jedi dreams in Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. I can check out new games almost as easy as hitting play on a Netflix show, too, thanks to the recently added ability to stream titles from the cloud.

But now that Microsoft is paying $68.7 billion to acquire Activision Blizzard — the company’s biggest buy in history — it’s going to be even harder for other gaming companies to pull me away from Game Pass as its power and influence grow.

Microsoft has been leading the charge on a Netflix-esque gaming service for years. The company first launched Xbox Game Pass in 2017, and it feels like it’s been on a shopping spree ever since. It acquired Skyrim-maker Bethesda Softworks, Tim Schafer’s Double Fine, and the studio behind the Forza Horizon series to bolster its roster of developers and, importantly, the number of games it can exclusively offer on Game Pass. With its priciest $15-a-month plan, Microsoft lets you play many Game Pass games on many non-Xbox devices via the cloud, too — a useful option at a time when new Xbox consoles are hard to come by.

With Activision, Microsoft would get a huge stable of hit games that could make the already-great Game Pass nearly unbeatable, particularly if Microsoft were to withhold them from other platforms like Sony’s PlayStation.