You know.... because Sony keeps the trends it creates.

From what I know they lend money.

yep free online gaming

I'm rather disgusted by this news and Phil Spencer is the biggest hypocrite (in the open that is)

"Microsoft's astonishing $68bn price-tag for Activision Blizzard was calculated based on a price of $95 per share - roughly 45 percent above Activision's stock price before the announcement.

Come 2023, when the deal is likely finalised, this will give Activision Blizzard's shareholders a significant payday. This is also expected to be when controversial boss Bobby Kotick finally exits."

The irony: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2021-11-18-xboxs-phil-spencer-tells-staff-he-is-evaluating-all-aspects-of-relationship-with-activision-blizzard

After evaluation this is what they came up with. Reward the cunts with a huge buyout so they can retire in luxury while the narrative shifts the focus away from the investigation. No doubt this deal was already on the table in November, it didn't just happen out of the blue.

DISGUSTING. And it's working. 99% of the talk is about further acquisitions, what it means for game pass, for subscriptions, for Sony, with a little footnote, maybe it will get better for the employees. Yet Kotick is guaranteed to stay until the buyout is complete after which he gets a golden handshake to retire. Will the rest of the enablers on the board get removed? Will working conditions actually improve?

Actually the narrative of cleaning up the company will distract from all the redundancies while the company is restructured. Jobs are never safe during a big take over, from having cunts as bosses to wondering whether you'll be made redundant.

Go on celebrating CoD on gamepass, this 69 billion deal is for the mobile market. There isn't enough profit in 'core' games to warrant this size of an acquisition. It's all about breaking into mobile with the dream of hundreds of millions of mobile gamers on gamepass buying micro tranactions.

Signed deals they wouldn`t really be able to cancel. Games that are already released there would be no point in removing. But new content won`t release, and that doesn`t really match with "play anywhere on the device you want" that he preaches. Same will happen here, CoD will keep coming to PS until the marketing deal is over, games released will keep for the time, new games won`t come.

That is what everyone expect, but Phil will use silver tongue to pretend he isn`t impacting PS players. But sure you can still think he is a good guy. Next are we going to say he doesn't talk more than every other company PR people combined?

I think anyone that is saying “there’s too many sales on PlayStation for them to miss out on” is missing the point. Microsoft are probably more or less fine with short term losses if it means in the long term they offboard millions or tens of millions of people out of the PlayStation ecosystem. They do not want Sony to be a permanent revenue middleman they have to deal with.

This deal secured Microsoft a dominant market share on PC, and a huge new beachhead of mobile. But on console, the long term goal is to overtake PlayStation as the dominant platform. It will not happen this generation, PlayStations current lead is too large. But they want the PS4 to have been “peak PlayStation”.

I think it’s highly plausible that 10th generation Microsoft gains and holds a permanent market share lead over Sony in the console space

It will be very hard for Sony to respond to this, even with smaller Publisher like Take-Two (~$20B) like some suggested. Don't get me wrong they are big enough to do conclude a deal like this. But this Acti/Microsoft Deal put the industry on notice. If ever Sony enter acquisition negotiation with a big publisher. Microsoft will always be involved sooner or later than it will be who offer more and I don't think Sony could win any of those battles.

No he does not, you are just understanding whatever you want, the way you want, to make this sounds hypocrite.

Phil Spencer, never said games would not be exlusives and like Bethesda, anyone with a bit of comon sense knew, from the start of the aquisition, that new AAA games would be exclusive.

His statememt is about actual content: they won't pull anything from anyone that is already there. They will also fulfill any contract obligations etc. 

He never said anything about future games because this is just plain obvious that those are going to be exclusives. Of course you do not like the guy (doh...), but there is nothing hypocrite in what he is saying and Microsoft did actually what they always promised and kept those games available to the Play Station community (and they will not be gone anytime soon, only thing is that some 'people' are deciding that this should also include future games and therefor calling him an hypocrite based on their own understanding/take/wishes of the statement...).

If anything, the people who kept bitching Xbox and talked shit about having games only playable on their plastic boxes, while Xbox did not for years are the hypocrites... Esp. now that the opposite is happening.

I can't agree: the change in perspective is a downgrade. The old God of Wars didn't need to rely on red arrows to alert one of danger, for starters.

I'm the odd man out. I think this is great for gamers. It will give MS a competitive edge, in which Sony will need to respond too, which could include opening up more studios. Competition is good, market domination is bad. MS and Sony being 1:1 in the market place is great, given it will lead to better sales on software and hardware being cut in price.