"In a ruling submitted today, Judge Corley said the following:
Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision has been described as the largest in tech history. It deserves scrutiny. That scrutiny has paid off: Microsoft has committed in writing, in public, and in court to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation for 10 years on parity with Xbox. It made an agreement with Nintendo to bring Call of Duty to Switch. And it entered several agreements to for the first time bring Activision’s content to several cloud gaming services. This Court’s responsibility in this case is narrow. It is to decide if, notwithstanding these current circumstances, the merger should be halted—perhaps even terminated—pending resolution of the FTC administrative action. For the reasons explained, the Court finds the FTC has not shown a likelihood it will prevail on its claim this particular vertical merger in this specific industry may substantially lessen competition. To the contrary, the record evidence points to more consumer access to Call of Duty and other Activision content. The motion for a preliminary injunction is therefore DENIED. "
I mean, AoE was pretty awesome
I think that’s the point of the Xbox Game Studios. They purchase a bunch of existing games studios with good talent and let them mostly manage themselves and their own games direction.
MS doesn’t want full control anyway because yeah, they aren’t great at it. They just want to buy enough companies that they get the money from the good games. Then they’ll pull the good talent out of the shitty studios and shut them down.
I remember once upon a time browsing the Microsoft game studios site and getting excited for the upcoming RTS releases