It's not really "us vs them" than it is "well now you know what everyone else feels like". 

I'd like to have played MGS2 and FFX and GTA3 on the GameCube, Sony has been blocking content from other consoles for decades. 

It seems Microsoft is trying to pull the American move. Own 50% of tge market share and control the market almost entirely. This move wasn't for he Xbox series X or to one up Sony, although the extra Xbox sales wont hurt. Its to make game pass the Netflix of gaming within ten years.

But the thing is people always compare it to what Sony has done when they aren't the same circumstances. Sony has had years for their first parties to be able to get to that level because they were able to make that investment a long time ago since Playstation is one of their biggest money makers atm, they need to make sure it succeeds. Whereas with Xbox we know for a fact this gen that Microsoft started looking at it as not as important and possibly even going on without it, as Nadella once said, and its budget was slashed heavily as a result of that which lead to them not really being able to do much until Phil finally got promoted in late 2017 and was able to convince them that Xbox was important and actually got the funding to make some real changes, which we started seeing in 2018 almost immediately. 

That's always been the main thing said for ages now, no matter what, is "where are the games". Even now, after everything Xbox has done, you still see people saying "but the games still aren't here", and at this point it just feels disingenuous and mostly like fanboy shit because that means there was literally no winning situation for Microsoft with some of these people. We've seen the games, we know they are coming, just because they aren't here at this very second doesn't change that, and ignoring the circumstances as to why they aren't here yet is a convenience argument. Xbox basically had 3 options:

1) Create EVERY new studio they would have from the ground up and expand their current ones, which would take even LONGER for the games to develop and come out as a result, and these people would just still keep complaining about the same thing regardless for years about how "there's still no games tho", despite knowing that it's because they made every new studio completely like they apparently asked for? 

2) Acquire some new studios that already have a culture and development cycle that can now do a lot better with more funding and security, decreasing the amount of waiting it will take for games to release while also expanding their first party much quicker, which is the same thing these people have been asking for but suddenly that's not the way they want it when it was REALISTICALLY the only way it could be done in a reasonable amount of time, the same thing they were previously complaining about how long it was taking?

3) Rush out games sooner in order to fill a barren lineup that would have released at lower quality as a result, then these people would just use the lower quality to fuel their console war shit while STILL trying to say there are no games. 

Tell me what choice Microsoft could have made here that wouldn't have had these people (mostly fanboys) ultimately complaining about the same thing; ie wHERe aRe tHE gAmES. And i've seen "but they should have done these things years ago so the games would be ready by now" plenty of times which also makes no sense, as I mentioned they literally COULDN'T do anything to change these things until recently. 

It's just like when these random armchair devs on forums who have never worked on a piece of hardware kept trying to dictate what the Switch could run third party wise, and the goalposts just kept moving and destroying everything they said to the point where all they can say now is "lol well the games look like shit tho" in the corner passive aggressively because they don't like looking dumb. That's what "well still no games rn tho" has become for Xbox because now that Microsoft is making moves that these people didn't expect they ever would be, it's the only thing they can resort to saying to try to downplay it all, especially when plenty of games actually have released already too. 

In terms of acquisitions it's no different from how you see the passive aggressive angry comments of "lol when you can't make it yourself just buy it", "gotta buy stuff to keep away from other platforms", etc as if it's some good dig at Microsoft when it literally just shows how clueless they are. It's like these people are pretending Microsoft walked into their offices, pointed a gun to their heads and performed a hostile takeover. Every single company Microsoft has acquired has agreed to be acquired, and i'm pretty sure I would trust these companies to know more about what the pros and cons of being acquired are for themselves compared to random forum posters who will never work there or in the industry whatsoever. 

In other words, Microsoft is finally acting like Microsoft again... 

People seem to believe the MS that the EU took down was an uncharacteristic iteration of the company: they are wrong, this is how they are supposed to act. 

Sony only buys certain studios fine, but they are annoyingly active in trying to block other platforms from content. FF7R exclusivity for a year, FF16 exclusivity for a year, blocking Spider-Man in other versions of Avengers (how fucking petty is this)?, now there's talk of a MGS1 Remake that they've money hatted.

So sorry I don't feel bad if someone finally walloped Sony upside the head. Sony's been block content from other platforms for decades, it's hard to feel sympathy for them when they pushed someone too big and now got pushed back onto their ass.

Well, it is expected. Risk is growing higher and returns are getting worse, so it's likely a good deal for both, MS and the shareholders of The purchased companies. I would say that there are studios that would be shut down if MS would not purchase them. Also, as you all have Windows on your PC anyway, you get the games for Windows.

A large part of that is the simple fact that Final Fantasy sells poorly on Xbox, as does pretty much every other Japanese franchise. Setting aside Xbox's bad performance in Japan, even in the US the series sells far better on PlayStation. So that's just as much on the Xbox userbase as it is on Sony.

Sony has been trying to block Final Fantasy from other platforms since 1996, lets be honest. They just don't have enough money to force Square-Enix to do it outright so they do it bit by bit. I also think they privately try and get designers like Nomura to be actively anti-non-Playstation platform too. They've been doing this stuff for ages. 

The only thing the PS1 + PS2 eras taught Sony was to win you bully your way to the top by locking out content from competing platforms. The only problem with that for them is Microsoft if motivated to do so can play that game a lot better than they can. 

Yeah... no. That's a load of complete rubbish, sorry.

Sony didn't have to bully Square into doing anything. The PlayStation line has always been their top choice. The PS1 was the only successful console with a CD-ROM drive. The N64 had cartridges, the Saturn simply failed. The PS2 had a userbase that dwarfed the Xbox and Gamecube combined. The Xbox's sales in Japan were Virtual Boy levels of awful, and the system was a modest success at best in the US, so there was no incentive for Square Enix to bring FFX or FFXII to Xbox. They did bring Final Fantasy to the 360, and despite the fact that the 360 had a larger userbase in the US, the PS3 version far outsold the 360 version in both Japan and the United States. Then the PS4 ended up winning heavily out of the gate against the X1, and the PS4 version of XV left the X1 version in the dust. So no, there is no grand conspiracy afoot here.

Square did gladly accept an investment from Sony in the 1990s, one that helped them bring The Spirits Within to the screen through Sony Pictures, whatever the final box office outcome might have been.