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IcaroRibeiro said:
Machiavellian said:

Its not a question of what bothers you, I am saying what bothers a business.  For MS, as a business and in 3rd place, the investment to out money hat Sony is steep.  The market leader gains an advantage because as long as they can make these deals at a much cheaper rate, it takes twice the capitol for MS to to even compete.  So for MS, what is best for them, trying to match Sony and paying 100 million dollars for a year of exclusive which mind you was the going rate a while ago compared to taking that company out of the picture.  

What does it mean if its a publisher or a bunch of studios, its pretty much the same thing.  If Sony purchase 5 studios would that equal to most publishers output.  Either way, as far as I am concerned, I am only looking at the landscape.  3rd party lockout deals always favor the platform with the biggest install base than the smaller one because you can easily wait until that game releases but if you are the market leader it helps more to protect your market share as consumers would be less inclined to leave when they get things first.

For each OEM, any of these companies purchase a studio its off the board for another platform and none of it has anything to do with how gamers feel.  None of them care, they care about their business and you as the consumer only benefit as long as competition remains strong among them all.

As a consumer the only thing that benefits me is those companies to keep independent. Hardware manufacturing is already a monopoly, soon software production will be as well. Both Sony and Nintendo were able to get enough quality in house games that convince people their platform is superior. MS has a much better third party support than Nintendo and have pretty much all big Sony titles except few JRPGs that don't even sell 5million copies on Playstation. Yet, MS hardware sales are sub-par, disproportionately low compared to both Sony and Nintendo considering the amount of third parties secured for them. 

Microsoft buying third parties will lead to not only less diversification and less competition but also mediocre gaming output. I can't fathom how one of the biggest worlds companies were unable to release a single eventful game in over a decade. It's truly mesmerizing if you think about it 

That is exactly my point, if every business operated at what is best for you as a consumer and operated on what you felt is fair, they would be out of business.  Only the strong survive and companies who can carve out their space using whatever advantage they have gets to see another sunrise. What keep them doing things that pleases you is competition.  Without competition then they get stagnant only using techniques to squash any competition and only bringing innovative features and products when threaten.

It seems your whole point is that companies should be independent because you feel it benefits you but there is a reason a company goes up for purchase and you can be assured that its for their own benefit.  Bungie did not sell themselves to Sony to benefit you, they sold themselves to Sony to benefit their company and reach whatever goal they felt they could not achieve without bigger pockets.  The same case can be said for Bethesda for going MS.  For ABK, we have seen a lot of internal turmoil which it would appear that MS can come in and help mitigate before it tears the company apart.  Just the fact that MS is accepting the unionization of the company is giving them more hope of a better existence under MS then current leadership.

So my point remains that what is best for you isn't what is best for these companies and they cannot operate, grow and stay healthy is all they do is what is best for what consumers believe is good.  Yeah it would be great for us consumers if all games where multi and we only need to pick one system and play whatever we want but that isn't the game being played.  One thing is sure is that after all this is done, their could be more players or less players.  New players could flip everything around and the landscape in 10 years probably will look nothing like today but one thing is for sure.  Any company who isn't willing to use whatever they got to expand and grow will be left behind because that is how business work.  I just look at the mobile market space to see how that turned out.