firewuf
The reason ActiBliz + MS deal it is getting scrutinized more is because Lina Khan became head of the FTC, and she looks at mergers and acquisitions with the same dislike that everyone had towards Standard Oil monopoly and AT&T monopoly back in the day.
The Obama Administration had a very lax antitrust policy. For example, they approved the Ticketmaster + Live Nation merger despite it clearly being a vertical merger that gave a single company control of the majority of both the venues concerts were held at and the tickets being sold for those concerts, ultimately resulting in the Taylor Swift fiasco that was in the news a couple months ago. Monopolies like Ticketmaster are complacent because there is no one to compete against and therefore no reason to make things better for the consumer. Things have changed because the head of the FTC (and many other government agencies) changes when a new president gets elected.
People like to only focus on how prices change as a result of mergers, but until the 1980s everyone including judges also considered the political and social cost of mergers, in addition to the monetary cost to consumers. Maybe if we continued to do that and didn’t largely stop in the 1980s we would not have too-big-to-fail banks or a mobile app store duopoly.
Microsoft needs to be stopped from acquiring ActiBliz and broken up. Otherwise they’ll become even more impossible to regulate and be held accountable like banks.
While Nintendo’s hardware is less powerful on every level, I think that the majority of their games have lots of effort put into them. While Nintendo definitely has had some horrible games (Mario Party 9, 10, Animal Crossing Amiibo Festival, Mario sports since the mid 2010s) or just plain average games (see New Super Mario Bros starting with the Wii entry) and their stance on emulation is horrible, I honestly think they put out some of the most creative games ever made (see Splatoon, The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild, Tears of the Kingdom, Super Mario 64, Pikmin 1, 2, 3, 4, F-Zero GX). At least give them a point for not putting microtransactions in their $60, now $70 games like other publishers (looking at you Activision, EA, Microsoft).
As for their hardware, I would rather them put their games on PC (so I don’t have to rip them myself). I like that they try new things with their hardware that few others do (see Wii motion controls (although a bit overdone at first), 3D gaming (3DS), a console that you can take anywhere (sure they weren’t the first to attempt it but they were the first to pull it off)). That being said I would much rather also be able to play their games on my Android or Steam Deck. The only reason I’m excited for their new hardware is to see what (if anything) new they will try, and for them to jump at least a decade closer to where the industry is at in terms of computing power.
Yay to new Nintendo console. Nay to ActiBliz + M$.
Puyo Puyo Tetris