Microsoft, Activision, and the human condition

It has been interesting watching the reaction about the announcement that Microsoft intends to purchase Activision for $70 billion dollars.

Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, I don’t know. I suppose it will have some good effects, some bad ones, and then some unforeseen consequences both positive and negative.

I have thoughts on what those might be!

1.) I saw someone on Twitter say that in the world of gaming, Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony are now the Big Three, while Google is in the corner eating paste. I have to admit that was pretty funny and might be accurate. 🙂 Another interesting view is that Microsoft and Sony are locked in a console arms war, while Nintendo is doing its own thing that doesn’t directly compete with either.

2.) I suppose it’s possible that the US Congress might try to block the deal on anticompetitive grounds, but it seems unlikely. It would be straightforward for Microsoft’s lawyers to establish in court that it isn’t a monopoly and still wouldn’t be one after buying Activision, especially since Sony and Nintendo both sold more consoles than Microsoft in 2021. For that matter, the Congressional leadership in the US is old enough that they probably only have a vague idea that video games exist at all, or of the scope and scale of the modern video game business. This isn’t to say that elderly people cannot enjoy video games (see the “Grandma Plays Game” phenomenon on YouTube and Twitch), but the most powerful elected officials in the US federal government are in their upper seventies and early eighties and not terribly in touch with life outside of their bubbles to begin with, and if you handed them a PlayStation controller they would probably think it was a Life Alert device.

3.) It would be good if Microsoft cleaned house at Activision. Regardless of all the other reports of bad activity at Activision, Blizzard used to make great games, and then Activision bought the company and promptly ran it into the ground. So a lot of upper management at Activision might get to spend more time with their families soon.

4.) In fact, given all the legal troubles at Activision, it would surprise me if Microsoft doesn’t have a plan to clean house. Otherwise Microsoft just paid $70 billion dollars to buy a whole bunch of lawsuits and labor disputes.

5.) Large corporate consolidation is, in general, bad.

6.) On the other hand, Microsoft was probably the best potential buyer. Activision is sitting on a ton of valuable IP, and Microsoft is likely to actually make use of it and make it available on PC and Xbox. Activision, by contrast, seemed content to coast on past glories and Call of Duty. And the Xbox ecosystem, by and large, is excellent, especially with the addition of Game Pass. Microsoft needs content for that ecosystem, so hopefully that means it will make maximum use of the stuff it just bought from Activision.

7.) Then again, nothing at all may happen. Big corporate buyouts like this sometimes appear with a lot of fanfare and then fizzle out into nothingness. Like when Activision bought Blizzard. 🙂

All and all, I’m very glad not to be in video game development – it is such a brutal and unforgiving business! You can work on something intensely for years, only for it all to fall apart in a second and to find yourself out of a job. That’s true of many fields of human endeavor, of course, but especially true in video games.

Living in fear that your job might evaporate at any moment is an unpleasant way to live, though many, many, many people do so. Of course, complacency and the confidence that you can never be fired is just as bad – some of the most useless and simultaneously arrogant people I’ve personally met were paid from taxpayer or union funds (or taxpayer-funded unions) and probably hadn’t done a day of work in years. (This, of course, is not to say that all people paid from taxpayer funds are lazy, but if you work in government or education, I bet you thought of some of your co-workers when you read the previous sentence.) And we’ve all seen un-fireable CEOs with death grips on their companies who did terrible damage.

So there must be some middle ground, some middle career path between terror of losing your job and complacency, but I’m not wise enough to know what it might be. It might be one of the insoluble problems of the human condition. In fact, the old proverb YOU SHALL NOT WORK, YOU SHALL NOT EAT seems to be one of the inescapable laws of the human condition, with history an account of our failed efforts to escape it over and over again.

And this got philosophical for a post about video games.  I should probably go play some SKYRIM (also owned by Microsoft) to clear my head. 🙂

-JM