BadlyDrawnRhino

To be fair, half of the AAA gaming industry is all about trying to clone the latest successful game with a new coat of paint. Maybe using AI to make these clones will mean that the talented people behind the scenes are free to explore other ideas instead.

Of course in reality, it just means that the largest publishers will lay off a whole lot of people and keep churning out these uninspired games in the name of corporate profits, but it’s nice to dream sometimes.

At least with Metallica, we could laugh at the irony of a band regularly releasing songs about anarchy crying about piracy.

But Microsoft is doing exactly the same thing, only instead of paying for exclusivity of one title, they’re buying developers so not just their next title, but all future releases will be exclusive, up until MS decides they’re not worth it and dumps them.

Sony absolutely participates in anti-consumer practices, but let’s not pretend that MS is any better.

Microsoft are no longer interested in selling consoles necessarily, otherwise they’d be holding stuff back from PC as well. They’re interested in getting people into their ecosystem through Game Pass.

And while I agree with you that Sony and Nintendo have used plenty of anti-consumer practices, Microsoft has also done so in the past and I think the only reason they’ve been more pro-consumer of late is because they’ve been the underdog for a long time now. I would be anticipating a change in their behaviour the more people they get to subscribe to Game Pass, and this Activision-Blizzard deal is a huge step towards that.