#oneaday Day 1090: what

Microsoft bought Activision. What a colossal mess today's gaming industry has become. I can't pretend I'm not worried about this increasing tendency towards massive, multi-billion dollar takeovers — because while it's all been big triple-A publishers that I'm not at all interested in up until now, what happens when someone decided to start trying to get their hands on smaller companies that aren't balls-deep in crap like Game Pass and the like?

Thankfully, I feel like we're a way off that happening just yet. This is all "big business" stuff at the moment. Microsoft want Call of Duty day one on Game Pass so all the dudebros will sign up for Game Pass, so they just went and bought the people who make Call of Duty. I suspect Call of Duty will still come out on PlayStation — Microsoft likes money, after all, and they let Minecraft come out on non-Microsoft platforms even after buying it — but you can bet that it being on Game Pass is going to secure a mostly Microsoft future for its playerbase.

With this in mind, the one thing that I take a certain amount of comfort from is that most of the developers and publishers who put out things I'm interested in probably aren't even on Microsoft (or Sony's) radar. Out of all of them, Koei Tecmo is arguably the most "at risk", but I don't think they're big enough or that they have enough valuable properties for the suits to want to buy them up.

Square Enix is another matter, of course, but outside of Final Fantasy and Nier I'm not too bothered about a lot of the stuff they've been doing of late; to put it another way, I like Square Enix when they're being Square Enix, not when they're being Eidos. And at this point, I feel like Final Fantasy XIV is probably a big barrier to any sort of takeover attempt — although I guess Activision does still have World of Warcraft, as much as that game has been in decline for quite some time now.

Anyway, I feel like we're going to have to wait and see what the long-term consequences of this are. Hopefully at the very least Bobby Kotick ends up out on his arse — it sounds as if that will be the case once the deal is finalised — but you know he's probably going to have some sort of obscenely generous severance package lined up, even with all the vile shit he's been part of during his time at the top.

This is the one possible positive out of the whole situation, really; under the Microsoft umbrella, I suspect Activision is about to enjoy a severe case of cleaning house, since I don't see MS wanting to deal with the PR nightmare that Activision has been weathering for the last while.

Sigh. Anyway. I'm going to go and play retro games in bed, far away from all these shenanigans!