... 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.
Only a handful of games and only after they are several years old. But not the whole franchise, so unless you have a PlayStation or had one in the past and played the other games in the franchise, you may be missing too much story to understand what's going on.
Other than Spider-Man, it really feels like Sony coming out with games on PC is just to get you to buy a PlayStation to finish the franchise. Almost like a demo.
I appreciate what Sony has done, and I had a ton of fun playing Horizon Zero Dawn and Spider-Man, but as much as I want to play Uncharted, people tell me that I just can't start from the end of that series. And I don't really feel motivated to get God of War knowing they may wait 5+ years to put Valhalla on PC.
Yeah, Sony still is very much focused on pushing people to proprietary hardware. I'm glad they changed in some aspects as they saw the lost market potential of letting Microsoft dominate in the PC area. But, it is telling that if Sony bought a studio my first worry would be about games no longer being released day 1 on PC whereas that worry doesn't exist for Microsoft. So Sony has improvements to make.
At least they seem to be committed to fixing them. But yeah, with the reputation they have made for themselves, I definitely wouldn't get any of their games at launch without reading lots of reviews. I did pick up Spider-Man at launch because the reviews seemed good, and I thought it was pretty damn solid of a port at launch. I wanted to get TLOU at launch, as I have never been able to play that game. But apparently it was a complete dumpster fire. I guess it has already improved a lot, but I already moved on to other games. I'll get it when it goes on sale.
At least 10 years, likely never. Just like how Minecraft is still multiplatform on every device under the sun, COD/Diablo/etc will be too because that's what their strength is - huge userbases.
Ten years, if they stick by the claim they made under oath about CoD. Other games? Don't know. But not every ActBlizz game as long as CoD is still around. Theoretically, they could throw CoD under a new banner and spin it off into "not-ActivisionBlizzard", but I don't know what their plans are.
To be honest, while Activision's recent games tend to get equal treatment on PC and console (I believe; I may be wrong), Blizzard is another story entirely. And Activision-developed games right now amount to CoD, Crash, and Tony Hawk.
Blizzard's in a different situation. Games like WoW aren't and likely won't ever be on consoles (unless this deal gets it on Xbox somehow). Warcraft and StarCraft are pretty much PC-only with a couple of console ports early on. Hearthstone is PC and mobile. (Note: I'm counting Mac as PC purely out of convenience and I don't really care that Apple doesn't like the label.)
Overwatch is on consoles, but it has other issues. In my experience, it's always felt like more dev attention is paid to the PC version, but I can't really state that as fact. I don't know if Diablo favors PC over consoles either when it comes to development focus. From what I understand, IV is working equally fine across systems, but I don't play it or pay attention to it much.
King is just mobile, so I doubt there'll be any change there. To be honest, Microsoft's continual insistence on gaining a presence on mobile makes me think King may be more valuable to them in some respect compared to the other two.