In all fairness, the prices of entire business is going up, including from their competitors, due to number of factors that has nothing to do with the acquisition. The question is, would Microsoft stay at the same price even if they didn’t purchase Activision-Blizzard-King? Would Microsoft layoff people and replace them with Ai, even if they did not buy Activision? What do other companies do? Would Microsoft change the Game Pass price anyway, because it did not workout well (especially without Activision library included)? What is the competition doing?
The competition is following an industry leader who is only an industry leader because their other business makes so much money hand over fist that they can just keep dumping money into gaming just to maintain dominance. The answer to the question you propose another question “How can we cut costs and increase profit?” And the easiest way to do that is to reduce labor and raise prices, and if they can get away with it, Monopolize. So yes, Microsoft executives would be doing this exact same thing without the Activision Blizzard purchase. But because they can get away with purchasing all potential competition, they’ll do that first.
In all fairness, the prices of entire business is going up, including from their competitors, due to number of factors that has nothing to do with the acquisition. The question is, would Microsoft stay at the same price even if they didn’t purchase Activision-Blizzard-King? Would Microsoft layoff people and replace them with Ai, even if they did not buy Activision? What do other companies do? Would Microsoft change the Game Pass price anyway, because it did not workout well (especially without Activision library included)? What is the competition doing?
Good questions. Those problems are all exacerbated after two giant “competing” corporations merged into one even larger corporation.
The competition is following an industry leader who is only an industry leader because their other business makes so much money hand over fist that they can just keep dumping money into gaming just to maintain dominance. The answer to the question you propose another question “How can we cut costs and increase profit?” And the easiest way to do that is to reduce labor and raise prices, and if they can get away with it, Monopolize. So yes, Microsoft executives would be doing this exact same thing without the Activision Blizzard purchase. But because they can get away with purchasing all potential competition, they’ll do that first.