Semantic Nonsense: Microsoft and Activision Blizzard come together, right now…ish

All your Activision are belong to Microsoft

Well, it’s all over but the crying. And yes, barring any last-minute miracle, I am going to take another L in the new year’s predictions.

Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard is now inevitable. This comes after the Ninth Circuit Court last Friday opted not to block the transaction while the FTC goes through the appeals process. The court in denying the injunction stated the FTC’s case in the upcoming appeal was unlikely to succeed on its merits. Microsoft and Activision are negotiating to extend the merger’s contractual deadline of today in order to tidy up an outsanding piece of business with the United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority.

Though most hangers-on suspect that if things don’t go smoothly with the CMA, the answer will be to simply exclude the UK from Xbox Game Pass, as cloud gaming was the CMA’s concern. I cannot imagine losing a few million Game Pass subscribers is worse for Microsoft than losing the merger.

This whole situation has been ugly to wrestle with, as there aren’t really any “good guys.” We all know Microsoft has, to put it mildly, a bad history with this sort of thing. But we also know that getting Activision’s management in general and Bobby Kotick in particular out of the business is a social good. However, there’s also no question that media consolidation is the Monkey’s Paw method of solving that problem. Sony’s not smelling like roses either, having fought this tooth and nail with little more to power their arguments than weapons-grade hypocrisy. And while it’s nice to see the FTC actually pursue their obligation to fight anticompetitive practices, the case they put together was slapdash at best and overly focused on Call of Duty. If that’s their best, their best won’t do.

That being said, Sony came to Jesus VERY quickly on that 10-year Call of Duty deal Microsoft was passing around earlier, coming to terms the day after the ruling. They should have argued for Starfield or literally any other game(s) to be included as well, but Sony preferred being the star witness in a couple dozen failed government challenges over having leverage in negotiations. Yet another reason it’s hard to feel bad for them. It’s similar to but less extreme than Elon Musk wanting $90 million back from a law firm that would never have been hired (and therefore, paid) in the first place if he had simply followed his contract from the beginning.

Regardless of all that, this is a thing that is happening. And even though a lot of the consequences of this acquisition are plain to see on paper, how it all turns out is less clear. We know that Sony has a tremendous incentive now to produce a Call of Duty-killer within the next decade, but we don’t know how long it will take, how many it will take, or if they even generate a single hit along the way to begin with. We also don’t know what this means for the future of other established multiplatform franchises with slower release schedules. It’s reasonable to assume that Diablo IV is here to stay for the PlayStation, but Diablo V looms in the distant future. And throughout this whole experience, nobody has paid any mind whatsoever to Activision Blizzard’s most popular and most lucrative branch, King Digital Entertainment.

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Progress report

As you may remember from last week, I completed the second-biggest game on this year’s to-do list, Persona 4 Golden.

With this, I am improbably down to only one offstream game on this year’s to-do list and it’s only July. While I’m tempted to start next year’s project (3D Zeldas) early, I think the best play is to chip away at some of the incomplete games previously mentioned when building the original list. And also to finish up my mostly done run of Cult of the Lamb before Angela laps me.

So I think my updated, offstream to-do for this year now goes something like, Cult of the Lamb,Digimon World: Next Order and Zero Time Dilemma. I don’t want to get too ahead of myself; I should also repurpose some of that time to being better about actually going to the movies and knocking out at least a few more contributions for Quarantine Control.

Indeed, the time might be even better spent cutting into the 200-bob movies on my to-do list. I’ve already started catching up on the superhero movies I missed in the hopes that I would make it to Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 in time, only to discover it’s getting pushed out by Barbie and Oppenheimer. Though a more devastating discovery was that my preferred movie theater shut down in May while I wasn’t looking.

Another consequence of finishing Persona 4 Golden ahead of schedule is that there’s nothing really preventing me from fulfilling my sole remaining streaming request and the inspiration for making this the year of Persona, Persona 4 Arena. As such, I have altered my streaming schedule so it can be up next and I can finally clear that backlog. I do not know if this is going to be a one-shot or a beat-the-game stream; I’m not particularly good at fighting games but I have managed to drag myself through various Mortal Kombat story modes before.

Depending on how much time it takes, I may need to juggle around Final Fantasy III and Detroit‘s placement to ensure that Castlevania III still starts (and ideally finishes) in October. Depending on how quickly Thousand Arms finishes, how long I play Arena and how many weeks my streaming gets preempted by real life, we might be able to squeeze in Detroit before Halloween. Otherwise, it will follow Castlevania III, and any spare weeks before then will get filler streams.