Jumpin said:
Basically this. The pro-buyout people are full of shit when it comes to this statement of “it benefits gamers.” They never explain how it’s beneficial for massive conglomerates to swallow up companies. They also completely ignore the long history of criticism of these sorts of deals being called consistently since the days of Adam Smith. And then when anyone is pushed about the benefits. They being up l whataboutisms like “Disney + Fox” - yeah, that was bad too, and the FTC shouldn’t have approved that either. And these manufactured “crusades against big tech” arguments are based on pure stinky sensationalist fantasy. The last time I saw that argument in the forum, the guy even labelled Microsoft as the top tech company, and still supported them swallowing up third parties. Bottom line, people shouldn’t blindly support these sorts of corporate gorging deals just because it supports their bias or bandwagon selection. Large conglomerates swallowing up other large companies (or smaller competitive companies, for that matter) is unhealthy. |
No massive company getting more massive benefits us as end users, in any way. As for promises made by MS in this particular case, I will simply add that MS has a long history of antitrust behaviors, running all the way back to MS-DOS days, and spanning anything from media players, to browsers, to unfair OS fees to squeeze out competition. Add to that the fact that MS centrally has been hassling the Xbox division for over a decade, citing its failure to become properly profitable (some might argue that fewer software units sold on competing platforms will impact them negatively; this is moot considering they seem to be aiming for Live Service and subscription models going forward). There's no reason to think that this will be a good thing, for anyone. And, yes, the Disney/Fox merger was bullshit as well, there's similar reason to criticize AT&Ts handling of the Discovery group, when it merged with WarnerBros. Disney has been worrying me for years, they have way too much pull as is.
For me, there's no fandom involvement, I don't even own current gen consoles at the moment, and I play almost solely on PC. But these types of deals, and the overall direction of huge publishers and companies swallowing developers, is not a positive direction for us to cheer on. As for the crusade against big tech companies; I can only say that we need someone to keep these behemoths in check. Seeing what sort of power and influence they have is terrifying, to say the least. I suspect Americans have widely different views on these matters than most of us from Western Europe, companies running rampant and overtaking the state and other entities as superpowers is more or less the norm overseas.
