Hello Silly

MS is buying and building, this is what companies do if they want to stay relevant in an industry that has been making more money than Hollywood for the last decade. You do this by doing both.

"..it's OWNING, and dictating what streaming device gets those games,"

Which basically means playing the games on PC, Xbox and every other streaming device out there, sounds innocent to me.

"..games that have been on Playstation for decades, and in fact do better on PS."

Ah yes, here is the real concern, the real issue. Has nothing to do with the illuminate conspiracy theories of MS controlling everything or dictating how you play, it's just as simple as the games not being on PS anymore. If they truly did better on PS, why didn't Activision approach Sony for a buy out?

How it affects existing customers is pretty important.

It's not about multiple companies existing. That's not an issue. The issue happens, when some of the largest companies in the industry merge or combine together because that often leads to monopoly tactics.

That's why big mergers like this are often blocked. AT&T is a prime example. There are PLENTY of cellphone carriers, however, when AT&T tried to buy T-Mobile it was denied regardless of all the other carriers out there, because it would cause AT&T to be a near unrivaled company in the telecom industry with Sprint nearly out of business at the time it would be AT&T with over 60% - 70% of the market share, Verizon knocked down to less than 30%, and all the other hundreds of carriers sharing a tiny portion. At that point AT&T can charge all the smaller carriers to purchase space on their towers to use their service since it would have the largest coverage nationwide, and then Sprint would be dead, and Verizon would slowly be against the walls as well. Yet T-Mobile was able to merge with Sprint simply because Sprint was dying and filing for bankruptcy, and it would allow the 3rd and 5th largest players to merge together and still be 3rd in marketshare, but bringing more competition.

This is setting a similar precedent. If Microsoft and Activision merge, that does still leave other companies, but what it also does is pave the way for Microsoft to strong arm other developers and publishers into submitting to GamePass being the new industry standard, because their games may not sell otherwise as their fanbase has clearly shown they will flat out not support some games if they aren't on GamePass already without the Activision Blizzard boost. It also stifles competition with the other major players as well.

I personally think this has a good chance of going through, sine Xbox is the 4th and AB is the 6th largest publisher, and even merged they're still going to be ranked as 3rd on paper. However, where the monopoly comes into play is Sony now loses a large part of the revenue from Activision which will likely drop their overall earnings, and realistically put Xbox as the 2nd largest and if sales increase due to player bases having to swap to Xbox exclusively it puts them at Number 1, and that is the legal issue they face and why lawyers are already trying to block this.

It's not going to be blocked. Sony and Tencent are still larger.