Xbox buying Activision Blizzard is the beginning of the end for video games – Reader’s Feature

metro.co.uk:

A reader is so upset about Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard he’s worried it’ll be an end to video games as we know it.

January 18 2022 is a day that will live in infamy within the annals of the video games industry. It is the point at which Microsoft gave up any pretence of playing by the rules and after decades of being the least successful console of each generation acted like the equivalent of a surly teenager fed up of losing at Call Of Duty. Except instead of resorting to cheating and using an aimbot, Microsoft opened its war chest and bought itself the industry’s second biggest publisher.

They’d already done the same with Minecraft and Bethesda, and countless smaller developers, but this month the jokes about Microsoft treating the games industry as a pay-to-win business opportunity stopped being a joke and became grim reality.

Except for maybe improving the work environment at Activision Blizzard, there is not a single positive angle to the biggest company in the world simply buying itself a place in gaming – turning a previously independent publisher and developer into a corporate subsidiary.

If you’re a braindead fanboy then I guess you could celebrate that your favourite corporation has more money than its rival, but what this does is take games that used to be available to all and turns them into those you have to buy a specific console for. Oh sure, that’s not what Microsoft is saying right now, but they were the same when they bought Bethesda. At first most franchises were going to stay multiformat, then ‘some’, then none. Within a few months they just up and admitted the reason they bought Bethesda was to get themselves more exclusives.

They’ll probably pretend for a bit longer with Call Of Duty,