the antitrust behavior is two of the largest players in the gaming space combining. how is that going to promote competition? it's just going to make it easier for them to outspend and outlast and eventually ingest it's competition

Sony's gaming revenue is ~26 B

8 % of MSFT's revenue is from gaming = ~15 B

Nintendo 12 B

ABK 8 B

EA 7.5 B

( and that isn't including tencent and netease. i didn't bother trying to find figures for them but they are in the running here too )

Microsoft has one of the two biggest gaming subscription services. They would like to see gaming be a subscription business. When they say, we will still sell Call of Duty on other platforms they don't say that they will give it away on GamePass.

What's wrong with subscriptions? It lets a distributor scrape off the excess profit. Games are a hit driven business. It sounds great when a platoform offers two or three times the cost of development to a developer, but the model won't really work unless some titles make like 10x. Listen to Jason Blum explain why Netfilx is terrible for independent film.

You will just see a lot less independent developers (not hobbyists) and small publishers. Maybe no one cares. I will probably be retired by then.