What does a victory for GamePass and Microsoft look like?

Microsoft is the market maker.

Through GamePass, they are the ones that decide.

Well, what do we even put in front of gamers?

Hello. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Rob Zackney.

Rob is a senior editor at Waypoint and a co-host of Waypoint Radio.

You might have seen that last week, Xbox or Microsoft, which owns it, announced that it was acquiring Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion. This is a major gaming company and console maker

acquiring one of the biggest third-party game publishers in the industry. And if it goes through,

it would have really serious consequences,

not just for the future of the games industry itself, but potentially also for the types of games that get made, and the kind of business models that the industry depends on.

There's been a lot of discussion about whether this is a good move, whether Phil Spencer,

who heads up Xbox can be trusted, whether there's going to be antitrust

considerations with this move. In this discussion, Rob and I discuss all of those things, but in

particular, we take a more historical view as well to look back at what has been happening

over the past decade or so, to see how this fits into a broader trend and to think about

if this acquisition goes through what it's going to mean for the future of the games industry

as it becomes more dependent on a subscription-based model. And we see the intensification of existing

trends toward micro-transactions and always-on games and things like that that a lot of gamers

are complaining about and say are changing the types of games that get made and are making

them worse. So there are a ton of structural factors to consider here that I think are really

fascinating and Rob digs into them in a really effective and detailed way that I think you are

...