LetMeEatCake

Agreed. Anti-trust law has been whittled away at for generations. FTC cannot do anything about that.

Even the idea of picking their battles will quickly become a damned if they do, damned if they don't scenario. If they only go after the safer cases, they'll let through a ton of big mergers/acquisitions, which in turn will signal that those cases are OK.

The hope to keep things as they were has been over for years.

The hope to control how bad things will get will never be lost, as we can always put in the work to make things less bad than they would otherwise be. No matter how atrocious climate events get, they can always get worse — that's what we need to endeavor to prevent.

For clean energy, there's an enormous amount of progress that is going to unfold over the next 10 and 20 years. It should be truly transformative, not just in an ecological sense but also in an economic sense. It'll be a generation too late to prevent the greatest damage to our environment, but it'll be just on time to prevent things from being even worse.

At some point the focus for greatest impact is going to need to shift to ways we can accelerate the removal of carbon from the atmosphere or other methods of counteracting the heating effects. This isn't one we can solve by simply planting a fuckton of trees. It'll be a huge and expensive effort, whatever the solution is. A difficult one, too: going too far too quickly will give us the opposite problem of too much global cooling...

Wheel of Time is by far my favorite book series.

Since the series takes place over so many books, character growth is fantastically more organic than typical. Characters change as people and grow (or shrink) in power and it just works so much better than in a shorter series. The foreshadowing the best done in any story I've experienced yet: there's so many little details hidden away, little winks or nods to people that know are just buried everywhere. It's the only book series that I liked more on a re-read than on my first read; I liked read #3 more than the one before it, and the 4th (and most recent) was my favorite yet...

It's not without it's flaws, many of which I (and most fans) will acknowledge. But damn if it's not my favorite by a mile.

I don't know what your "reading stamina" is but if you can handle a lot of books and a lot of words, it's not a bad series for newer readers. The early books take care to ease the reader into the setting and even fantasy books in general. Book 1 in particular is written to intentionally evocative of LOTR before letting the series fully become it's own thing shortly afterwards. Sanderson was heavily influenced by WoT as well, and Mistborn is the book that got him the job of finishing WoT after RJ's premature death.

I just finished The Blade Itself last week. I really liked it! Going to dive into the rest of the trilogy (and the other books after) soon.

Logen is a fun character. One thing I noticed that I feel Abercrombie does particularly well is the reading tone, style, and just general flow changes by a fair amount depending on who the POV character is. It made me think about it in other books and I concluded it's something I haven't given other authors enough credit for doing too... Abercrombie did a particularly good job at it.

It's almost certainly just a case of me not being far enough into the books yet, but I only really felt like Glotka and his surrounding details was particularly dark.

Think it might end up my favorite series of the year, at least.

COD was the example you chose to highlight... It's also pretty damn close to it, here.

Activision: basically a COD factory only. COD has its own mobile version. Blizzard: Diablo, Overwatch, WoW. OW1+2 are on everything except mobile already. WoW doesn't make sense to move beyond where it is. Diablo is on everything except Switch, and has its own mobile versions. Presumably the lack of a Switch release is a hardware issue, as D3 was on Switch.
King: mobile exclusively.

Other than COD on Switch, which again Kotick all but committed to, what new platforms can they bring their games to? I'm not seeing it.

Every single gaming IP Sony has purchased pales in comparison to the sheer financial juggernaut that is COD. Purchasing Activision is bigger than all of Microsoft's other gaming purchases combined. There's a good chance it's bigger than all of the gaming purchases from Sony and Microsoft pre-Activision — combined.

As a gaming entity, Activision is in the same ballpark in size as Sony. Sony's market cap last I checked was ~$120b, but they also have a consumer electronics division, music division, movie division, image sensors division, etc. Without an acquisition markup Activision might be worth ~$50b today or so, and Sony's gaming-only value might be in the $60-80b range if I had to guess.

Activision-Blizzard has about 17,000 employees. Naughty Dog has 400.

Past acquisitions — by anyone — in the gaming market are completely and utterly incomparable to this acquisition.

I haven't seen anything from Microsoft to indicate this. What did you see from them that makes you think that?

COD is already on Steam and mobile. The only new one there is Switch, which Kotick all but committed to making happen if Activision remained independent.

That only happens if Microsoft cleans house, which hasn't been their MO yet. It could happen. It's just not certain to happen. There's no real reason to predict it will or will not happen in either direction.

Gamepass as it currently exists will be gone within a decade. This is the Netflix or Amazon model at play. Run service cheaply until it hits critical mass, then start ramping the price up to turn it profitable. You won't be getting unlimited $70 games on launch for $15/month for forever.

Even if the above is wrong: a successful GP will fundamentally alter the way games are made. Content is aggressively and constantly tweaked or changed structurally in order to optimize profit. You know why search results on Google are garbage? Because people found a way to take advantage of that system to make the most money; doing so pushed out the good results. Same reason why all the biggest youtube channels have the content creator making a stupid face in the thumbnail with a clickbait title. Same reason why film has moved towards cinematic universes lately, or why so many IPs have moved towards the TV format (its for streaming).

Consumer oriented content changes when the revenue model changes. If GP is influential enough, games will change to optimize for whatever method makes the most money there — and that model will not be the one that exists currently. If Microsoft pays them by hours of playtime, games will become bloated with more and more empty content or arbitrary difficulty. If DLC continues to not be included, more and more core game content will shift towards DLC that becomes more expensive. Etc.

Cementing Gamepass is anything but a "tremendous" benefit for gamers.

They're run more effectively than Microsoft has run their gaming division for the past ~15 years or so... Microsoft's gaming leadership has seen one of the most valuable gaming IPs, Halo, flounder again and again and again. They closed all their game studios and spent a whole generation with minimal first party exclusives, they did I don't know how much damage to Arkane with Redfall...

More generally, Microsoft's approach to leading their game studios is to leave them to run the way the studio was ran pre-acquisition. Activision-Blizzard is not going to see major changes to the way they run if this deal does go through (pending CMA). Microsoft will Activision to be run the way it is now, and only intervene if profits dip too much (considering Halo, though, that might take quite the dip).

I don't get the assumption that Activision is going to see some major cleanup from this. They won't.

Kotick gets rewarded by the deal going through. Billions of dollars from the sale. Worst case for him after that is a few hundred million from a golden parachute if he's fired. We have no real reason to think he will (or won't, to be clear) be fired though, so there's a very real chance this is full reward for him: giant piles of money and continues to get to run Activision-Blizzard, just with Microsoft bosses above him.

The deal going through isn't something you want if you hate him.