Games

1. I don't know the details of how hands-on or hands-off Microsoft has been or should have been with studios, but even at the time of the AB acquisition the reputation for results was bad. I found an article from 2018 looking at the studios Microsoft had purchased up until then. Mohjang is really the only success story- Bungie never got back to where they were with HALO and got spun off, Rare has never reached their N64 peak again, and several other studios just closed.

2. Things have not been close to "okay" since these acquisitions. Microsoft laid off almost 2,000 people from Activision-Blizzard in January 2024. Then in May they closed 3 Zenimax-owned studios- Tango, Arkane Austin, and Alpha Dog. They then announced another 650 layoffs in September, with more expected in 2025. Microsoft is throwing money at buying up IP and then firing the employees and closing down.

3. What don't you like about Sony releasing their games on PC? Almost all of Microsoft's games have been (at least most of the ones worth playing) throughout the history of Xbox. I think timed exclusivity is reasonable and I can be patient. Some of the ports had better or worse launch experiences but it's been a while since I can remember a bad one. If anything I wish Nintendo would get with the program and release games on PC too, though that probably will never happen.

The PS5 is leading the Xbox, but neither are anywhere close to the Switch. Microsoft absolutely dwarfs Sony as a parent company- Sony never would have stood any chance at buying Zenimax, let alone AB. I do agree that this isn't necessary to remain competitive and would be and for the industry, but this isn't anywhere close to the scale of those deals. I will note that the Activision-Blizzard merger is still pretty recent, and Phil Spencer has mentioned wanting to continue acquisitions (like King, the maker of Candy Crush), so this could also be Sony trying to respond to that.

The estimated I see have all of Kadokawa values at ~$2.7 billion. My uneducated guess is that FromSoft is probably a couple hundred million of that, just knowing how many other assets Kadokawa owns (and remember- Sony has non-gaming-related interest in Kadokawa too). Activision-Blizzard was sold for ~$69 billion.

Also it's worth pointing out that Sony are already partial owners of FromSoft. And Sony, while not perfect, had a much better record of managing their acquired studios than Microsoft. Look at Naughty Dog and Insomniac for examples. I'd have to go back and do research to confirm, but I think the only studios Sony has closed have been ones they started. London studios (which was mostly focused on toe-in titles for hardware gimmicks like the Move and Wonderbook) and Japan Studios, which for years was more of a support studio and an incubator for talent they would move to other studios later- like Team Icon and Team Asobi.

I don't mean to come across as a PlayStation fanboy- Sony has made a ton of mistakes of their own over the years. But most of their mistakes have just been side projects like VR, Move, the EyeToy. You can argue whether the PSP and Vita were successful or not. On comparison, Xbox has consistently sold less and has still not been profitable in close in 25 years, while Nintendo has been wildly volatile with huge hits like the Wii and Switch and huge misses like the WiiU.

I got into a lot of discussions with people who seemed to believe that Microsoft would "save" Activision-Blizzard. Clean up the culture, create a better work environment, shift the focus away from live-services and micro-transactions. People were expecting a lot of their older games to make their way to GamePass... Which is a whole other kind of predatory pricing.

Lo and behold- AB went ahead and laid off almost 2,000 redundant positions after the acquisition and don't seem to have changed their business structure much.

It seems buying ABK made MSFT give up on exclusivity entirely