You are spouting absolute nonsense. I don’t have a current gen xbox nor do I have any interest in game pass. I don’t even give a fuck about CoD or Blizzard’s games. My reasoning is mostly wanting to see Bobby Kotick removed and this is the most likely means of seeing that happen.
Secondarily Activision seems content to sit on a mountain of IP and never use it and instead milks a small handful of IPs into burnout. Microsoft has its problems but they’re generally the lesser evil in this respect and have explicitly stated their intention to bring back a lot of IPs that Activision has let languish.
This merger benefits most people who are into video games, not a “very specific subset of consumers”. If anything the consumers this “hurts” is a specific subset, people exclusively interested in Sony hardware. Since Xbox, Sony, and Activision all release games on PC anyway.
As for anti-competitive, Xbox’s been in “3rd place” for ages. I even have my doubts that after having bought Activision that they’ll turn out a significant gain.
I know people dislike mergers for good reason but in all honesty I’ve been wanting this to just go through just so I can know whether they boot Kotick out. If they don’t… boo.
I don’t have any interest in CoD anymore. There are a few IPs I’d like to see explored though that Activision has been sitting on and ignoring. And some that Activision “might” own that they’ve been too lazy to check but still threaten to litigate if it turns out that they do own (No One Lives Forever).
I heard that because of the overwhelming popularity the devs have had to react to the server strain and focus on mostly fixes. I’m fine with the focus being on “under the hood” improvements with these updates for now. There is a lot of content to explore for brand new players so atm they can easily take their time on the content updates.
Portal can be decent fun, but the problem is that the devs did a poor job integrating it into the rest of progression so very few people play it unless its 1000% damage HC servers.
The regular modes are generally a lot more rewarding IMO and at this point the content for it is reasonably fleshed out. The biggest issue is that now the new content that is coming is very much a drip feed.
Basically every single player game I’ve beaten, including ones I’ve not touched in ages I tend to check in on communities for out of curiosity.
When it comes to PVP games, only games where I put at least 250+ hours into where I feel comfortable making any kind of meaningful post.