Let's hope they keep things as they are, maybe bringing some Acti games to Steam, and focus on getting more people on GamePass.

The question now is, what will Sony do? They need to do something to counter this movement and there are only two possibilities for that: EA or Take-Two.

Sony will certainly need to start buying companies otherwise the longer they wait, the more companies MS will gobble up. The question is whether or not Sony has enough money to buy EA or Take-Two or Ubisoft/etc. Sony's other businesses has been kinda meh afaik. Mobile has been yikes worthy, movies has been affected by covid lockdowns and such and they seem to want to get into the car making business which needs a lot of funding. While Playstation is a success, idk if Sony has anything that gives them nearly limitless funds like Windows and Azure that MS has. Heck, Sony even uses Azure... Not to mention, I am sure the share holders are looking at how much MS is willing to spend and if the time comes, they would probably ask a lot more than the game company is probably worth.

So there's a lot of factors into it but I also don't think Sony has much of a choice but to buy a big profile company. Cause every time MS buys a gaming company, it's another part of Sonys revenue gone. Call of Duty for example is a huge chunk of revenue on Playstation due to 30% cut and once MS makes it exclusive, that's a lot less money for Sony.

Yeah, they definitely will need to answer. Consolidation sucks but it is what it is.

Since the large Japanese developers are likely safe from foreign buyouts, it'll probably be Take-Two or Ubisoft, or both.

Not a fan of big acquisitions like this. Consolidation is looking to be the future for gaming, sadly and can see more big buyouts like this in the years to come. Annoyingly it doesn't benefit consumers and, worst stunts good competition. Activision/Blizzard has a huge hold in the market in all fronts of gaming - PC (MMO in particular with WoW), console and mobile.

The optimist in me hopes this will help Acti/Blizz get their act together with their games and will help the company by gettingrid of the rotten apples in the company.. on the other hand Kotick is still there and a buyout of this size isn't healthy for the future of gaming and further deepens walled gardens. If MS gets EA/Ubisoft as well you might as well call it a monopoly.

Reminds of of how Disney has been basically buying its competition. Leaving only a few big names left in the movie/entertainment business.

After getting The Elder Scrolls/Fallout and now CoD, the only bombshell of similar size Sony has in stock is going to Take-Two to get GTA. EA could be an option becaues Battlefield is COD's closest competitor and they'd get the bonus of Bioware with Mass Effect and Dragon Age, both western RPGs (of some kind...), which is what Sony lacks at the moment.

EA could be an option for them, especially seeing as how Sony doesn't really have a mainstay RTS of their own, while Ubi has one, EA has one, MS has one and even Blizzard has one. It's clear MS is trying to help bring back that genre (not much of a splash I guess, just like EA, but it might be them trying more in the future), and Sony doesn't really do anything much with that genre, and with EA they'd have a big FPS like BF and two RPG's as well as the sports games. 

One hell of a portfolio

*pic*

And even if Sony continues to make deals for CoD with Acti, that would still mean more money for MS as they would then own Acti/CoD itself.

Sony would do better to not make these deals anymore and focus on non MS owned pubs/IP's, because feeding anything onto them means feeding your competition, allowing them to further gobble up what you once partook in, and it's become obvious over the decades, these corps don't want a world where we all play fair and have "competition", they'd rather just destroy their competition or gobble them up, enjoying all the wealth/power that comes with it. 

I honestly think that between MS, Apple, Google and these holdings companies, that Sony/Nintendo are fighting a losing battle, possibly even the war, because Apple is a trillion dollar company like MS now, MS owns plenty already and has Azure/Windows and a few publishers under it's belt, as well as Candy Crush to further print out money.

The holdings companies are practically gobbling up anything in the smaller ponds every few months, just amassing their chests to stupidly large sizes and we still have to to understand or even know why these two holdings companies are only now gobbling up many studios (because they're holdings companies, they aren't like MS/Sony/Nintendo, let alone the other pubs and at their core, they operate differently, so why now and why them?). 

Since it originally was MS/Sony/Nintendo, followed by Acti/Ubi/EA/T2/Bethesda/Blizz, we've already seen MS gobble up 3, and I don't see EA/Ubi holding out for very much longer, given how Ubi's stock has gone back to being piss poor since before they got into bed with EG, and then there's EA just not doing great on most fronts and once again, promising us good shit and then taking forever to do it (where the fuck is my Red Alert 2 remaster?, it's been a year and not one word about their RTS division doing anything).

T2 is doing alright I guess, besides the GTA fuckup, they've bought Zynga, so I guess that's a plus in their eyes.

Pretty sure the Jap publishers don't have too much to worry about, regarding that Japanese law about Western companies not being allowed to outright own Japanese ones in Japanese territory. 

Consolidation sucks, yes. At least it's been MSoft, not Apple or something else outside of the industry trying to get a big splash.

One hell of a portfolio