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Comment by mcpackieh | Hacker News Reader

In the specific case of Activision, I really don't think making Activision be Xbox exclusive would kill Playstation. Activision has a pretty bad reputation in recent years, and (besides Call of Duty) the games they've put out recently have generally failed to be very influential: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activision#2010s

However, purchase of Activision may still be part of a larger anti-competitive scheme Microsoft has cooked up. I believe they've been buying lots of other game studios and publishers as well.

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You're looking at part of the acquisition, not the full one.

MS isn't acquiring Activision alone, they are acquiring Activision-Blizzard.

Which includes Activision Publishing, Blizzard Entertainment, King (Candy Crush), Major League Gaming, Activision Blizzard Studios, Infinity Ward and Treyarch among others.

No one on that list devs or publishes the games that sell PlayStations.

Sony are at least a decade ahead of MS in terms of having built a pipeline of developers that have the IP and quality standards that are console sellers even at the $500 price point.

I toyed with the idea of buying a series s because forza horizon is fun but it wasn't enough to justify even a $250 console.

Yeah, they don't sell PlayStations but they're going to start selling Xboxes. I'd love to play Starfield on my PS5 but that's just not an option.

So what you're saying is it would increase competition by selling more of the currently-less-popular platform rather than reduce it by eliminating the dominant platform? That sounds like an argument in favor of the deal.

I’d love to play God of War, The Last of Us, Drake’s Uncharted, Horizon Forbidden West, and a bunch of other PS5 exclusives.

Somehow this is different though, because Microsoft.

Sony went all in on exclusivity agreements and were dragged kicking and screaming into allowing cross play with other platforms. They are not the good guys here.

Many of them are on PC, they are no longer PS exclusives

So then there’s nothing wrong with Microsoft buying Activision-Blizzard as long as they release all their titles on PC as well as XBox?

With the possible exception of "Drake’s Uncharted" which I've never heard of, none of the other games you listed (including all currently released games in the Uncharted franchise) are PS5 exclusives (although most were initially only released on PS 2, 3, or 4)

If that's the standard you're using to define exclusives then Xbox has no exclusives at all, because every single Xbox game comes out on PC.

It's kind of true. I've always looked at Xbox as a low-end gaming PC that can't do much else but play games. Last time I checked there were only a few PS5 exclusives, and all of the biggest titles for the PS5 were either also PC games or remakes of PS3 or PS4 titles.

The difference is that the games you mentioned were made by developers that have been Sony in-house or second-party studios for literal decades, and weren't hoovered up from the open market like Microsoft is trying to do now because of how badly they mismanaged their own studios (343 Industries, The Coalition, Rare, etc).

FYI at least God of War and Horizon are not PS5 exclusives as they are also available on PS4.

Do you not think if Diablo V for example is only available on Xbox or PC but not PlayStation or Nintendo that might shift a few Xboxs?

Obviously Activision-Blizzard games are not PlayStation system sellers currently but that's because they're not exclusive.

Don’t move the goalposts, this isn’t about shifting a “few Xboxs” this is about PlayStation going out of business because of the merger, which is obviously an impossible claim by your own admission.

Playstation also has longstanding advantage for non-competitive games (JRPGs, action adventure, etc). The 360 was the last generation of Xbox that had a comparably wide spread of genres… each generation since has been host mostly to things like competitive FPS games.

Due to this, I've not felt a need to own an Xbox in a long time. A combo of a PS4/PS5 and custom PC has yielded the best coverage.

Diablo IV just came out and was a massive success, that's an Activision title.

Blizzard fans are not largely console gamers.

Console Overwatch's playerbase begs to differ. This isn't StarCraft 2 era Blizzard.

I agree that Activision does have a bad reputation, but I'm not so sure that is what comes to most peoples mind when they look at series like Call of Duty. Remember, a console is a multi-year investment. Even if Call of Duty games (and their other series) are bad right now, people will still consider the next 5 years of games when making their decision.

The Blizzard brands also have a massive hold in terms of player attention. Other than the names, I'm not sure it would be exceedingly difficult to re-create CoD style gameplay in another game. I mean even CoD isn't so unique, just critical mass and popularity over time.

In the end, it's the brands themselves that hold customers. They carry from release to release, good and bad. That's a harder ground to make up for than gameplay or style.

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