Microsoft now owns Crash Bandicoot

[A Black Falcon]

Yeah, that one's weird.  I mean, Sony bought Bungie!  That's kind of a big deal, Bungie is fairly important.  It was a $3.6 billion dollar deal, exactly.

However... apparently, Bungie will NOT be Playstation-exclusive.  The studio will apparently not be under the Playstation division of Sony, it will be separate, and they expressly said that Bungie will continue making games for all platforms including rival consoles.  So, Sony spent $3.6 billion to continue making Xbox games?  Uh... okay.  Maybe Destiny 2 makes enough revenues to make this make sense from a financial sense, because Bungie has a huge live-service game and Sony wants more of that, but otherwise it's kind of weird, you know?  Microsoft usually doesn't buy studios and then have them keep making Playstation games, after all.  Minecraft is the one exception there.  I guess this is more like Minecraft in that respect than MS's other purchases.  Odd.

The only reason it's "not yet to the point of convincing governments to stop it" is because antitrust lawsuits against major corporations have, largely, STOPPED.  MS is doing WAY worse things than bundling IE with Windows these days, but that slap on the wrist they got in the 90's isn't looking like it could even possibly happen.  Our government is subserviant to these giants.

The deal is highly unlikely to be blocked because it does not create a monopoly in any sense of the word, but apparently the government is going to be looking into the Microsoft-Activision deal.  Some scrutiny should be expected, considering that Biden put a fairly big-company-mergers-skeptical team in charge, much more so than we had had for some time.  There are several other large mergers that are probably not going to happen, largely because of regulator scrutiny, such as NVidia's attempt to purchase ARM.  (Though that one is not just a US thing, ARM is British.)

That comic is amusing, but exaggerates slightly.  Microsoft has a lot of money, but not enough to buy the entire industry if they wanted to... heh.  I think I've read that this deal will use up half of Microsoft's cash on hand.  Of course they make more of that every year, but still.