The Xbox-Activision deal has finally gone through. After drawn out court cases and appeals and testimony from bothPhil Spencer and Jim Ryan (who both said one thing and meant another),Microsoftwon. Can’t have winners without losers, and while the obvious loser here might beSony, more accurately, we’re all losers.
It’s fun to look at the properties Microsoft now owns and go ‘oh wow, we’re going to get a new Pitfall game!’, but it’s not that simple. Leaving aside the fact that history tells us the best we’ll probably get is an Activision-Blizzard Replay collection of old ports glued together, this is bigger than the games. It always has been. But no one, especially Sony, has been willing to point that out.
While we’re all losers here, Sony is clearly the biggest. For a long time, Sony has been winning the console war at a canter. ‘PlayStation’ has replaced ‘Nintendo’ as the synonym clueless parents use for games consoles, it outsellsXboxin both consoles and games, and Xbox has no titles to rivalThe Last of Us,Spider-Man, or evenGhost of Tsushimafor cultural clout.
Starfieldcould have been that game, but despiteBethesda’sbravado it is held back by dated design ideas - possibly a symptom of games taking almost a decade to make these days. Worse,it was outshone by Baldur’s Gate 3, which accidentally became a PS console exclusive when the Xbox Series S could not support multiplayer split-screen. An Xbox version is coming, but by now the damage has already been done.
Xbox has styled itself as the people’s princess this generation. From the affordable price of the Series S to the huge selection of Game Pass titles (including day one launches), Xbox is targeting hearts and minds, not pockets. But a schemer after the crown waits behind that fake smile. Its acquisitions are aimed at levelling the playing field. They are designed to further monopolise gaming, and will see lots of regular sized studios owned by ABK, Bethesda, or Microsoft be crushed into a fine powder to sprinkle some stardust on the biggest games it owns, likeCall of DutyorHalo.
The negative impact this monopolisation will have on the creativity of the industry, and the lack of job options it causes when one big company owns everything, have always been the reasons to criticise the deal. But Sony, the only critic given a serious voice, could never go down this path. It has spent years doing the same thing, albeit before the curve and a little quieter.
Naughty Dog,Insomniac, andSucker Punchhave all been acquired by Sony and now help its standing with exclusive killer apps. Even while the Activision deal was still going through, Sony acquired Bungie to helpsalvage Naughty Dog’s live-service efforts.
So instead, the debate has raged around Call of Duty. Rather than any major concessions of ownership, nor employee protection guarantees, Microsoft has been able to get this deal through by shearing off some minor cloud tech and by promising Sony can keep selling Call of Duty. Meanwhile, Call of Duty itself could well see more studios sacrificed to it as Microsoft hungers for a piece of the pie it has long been starved of. If killing off its smaller, more creative but less profitable studios means more CoD profit, we’d be foolish to expect Microsoft to act for the greater good.
There seems to be a sense that the saga is ‘over’. It’s out of the courts, the deal is approved, innocent until proven guilty or whatever the buzzword was when you wanted the green team to beat the blue team at owning billion-dollar corporations. Now we can relax and speculate about the new games we’ll get. As much as I’d love to chill out and think about us finally getting a newSpyroto follow Reignited, it has only just begun.
If we’re serious about the impact a deal like this can have on employees, we can’t just list all the games that might come back now. Is it fun to think about? Sure, go nuts. THPS 3+4 has a chance to live now. But Microsoft got this deal through without having to offer very much of value in the way of checks and balances against the damage monopolisation can cause. The company will need to be held to account if this deal proves damaging to employees, and the wider industry.
Think of it this way - it’s real cool that we could now get aCrash Bandicootgame made by Double Fine, ora Guitar Hero made by anyone who doesn’t have Bobby Kotick in their ear telling them about the wonders of AI. But those things can’t happen if Microsoft picks up where Activision-Blizzard left off and keeps condensing its smallest, most risk-taking studios down into gears to help the safe bets turn. If you want Xbox to make all of these great games it just bought, then you need to keep supporting employees who just got their studios sold from under their feet with no protections offered.
I know Activision-Blizzard-King was not employee of the year. Fromvarious employee lawsuits, to the Cosby Suite, to its own problems with studio consolidation, as well as the controversy around union-busting, it’s easy to see Xbox as the saviour. The people’s princess with that regal smile. But that people’s princess just spent $70 billion on the biggest act of monopolisation the industry has ever seen. She wants the crown. We need to be vigilant that employees are protected as she chases it.
