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Comment by zopppo | Hacker News Reader

> Its extremely frustrating how we let the tech companies get to be this large, such that now we really have to consider blocking every acquisition, even though this one in particular I think wouldn't be all that bad and may actually be a positive for consumers.

As an avid world of warcraft player, the community as a whole has been hoping the merger goes through for exactly this reason. Activision has seemingly forced through a lot of bad changes over the years to try wring out as much money as they can.

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I'm a part of the StarCraft 2 community and we were similarly hopeful about this deal as StarCraft has been neglected by the company for years. The community was already in full doom mode over Korean tournament funding getting pulled, this is not going to improve the atmosphere.

I'm not sure "I want my favorite game to get better" is a good reason to allow more mega-conglomeration.

Why not? In abstract the argument is:

"I want this product to be better"

The reason we don't want companies to gain market power (the feared result of mega-conglomeration) is because it allows companies to charge more for the same or a worse product.

If this person believes that Blizzard being acquired by microsoft will result in a better product, then they expect the net benefits to outweigh the negatives of Microsoft's increased market power over the video games market.

Acquisitions that produce a consumer-surplus should be most welcome!

I'm curious on how a MS merger would be good? At the start, they would almost certainly try to merge user accounts into MSN accounts. Likely force a migration down the line, after merging doesn't work.

The way I think others are thinking about it is that to Activision, making innovative new franchises or long term investments in general is a big risk since they are 100% a games company. Whereas if Microsoft owns them may face less pressure to cut costs/long term investments since it would make up a much smaller part of Microsoft's financials.

Whether that is how things usually turn out in practice with these sorts of acquisitions is a question I don't have a good answer to.

I just don't think I've seen evidence from MS that they foster that sort of thing, either? Have they shown that they can do a new franchise?

Or is the idea that MS would just dump a lot of money on them? Do they have a track record of that?

>force a migration down the line, after merging doesn't work

like the Mojang --> Microsoft --> XBox fiasco

Exactly what I was referencing. I should have said it. :D

If they merge user accounts but you can support for older products or other game changes it's possible people would be ok with that

Certainly many would be ok with it. The ones it will hurt will be the heavy users that have multiple accounts, is my guess. Also is annoying to families. Game accounts are just game accounts, even if that has grown. Giving the kids an MSN account did not sit well with me.

I and many other people had their accounts completely borked by the required migration. My lifetime license, gone, either through malice or incompetence. For trillion dollar companies, I always have to assume malice.

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