Embrace, extend, and extinguish. Classic microsoft. I do believe their first shot at what they are going to attempt now was Games For Windows Live, trying to centralize their position with PC and XBox when it comes to gaming.
Of course, that was a horribly executed mess and when it turned out nobody wanted to engage with that stuff, now it will most likely end up being “Microsoft Store with Microsoft account required” affair. For now they are going to play nice and show how fine they will play with Steam and Epic and how they will not make everything exclusive to MS Store and Xbox…
Until they buy out the major players because this time it seems they’ve decided to throw serious money at the problem. The fact that that for a good while the only country opposing Activisions acquisition by Microsoft was UK is a damn disgrace. It’s not about “just call of Duty”, quite frankly I did not play an Activision game in 6 years or so, but microsoft gaming market dominance won’t be good for anybody.
(Especially me playing everything on linux with proton)
Initially it was only the UK opposing it. While I may put my tinfoil hat for this, I wonder if the EU Commission was paid off or just clueless. I read their supposed reasoning for this, and all it focuses on is “game streaming” because apparently that’s a thing that EU Commissions cares or knows anything about. Worked out real good with Stadia, didn’t it.
So what I suspect will happen, if the acquisition goes through is that microsoft gonna set up a shitty game streaming service nobody will want to use, eventually make everything exclusive to ms store and xbox and laugh at the clueless bastards that allow that to happen.