My Life As A Gamer: Here Comes The Colony Drop (MS & Sony Buys)

Microsoft intending to assimilate Activision-Blizzard is now being followed-up by Sony assimilating Bungie.

This is looking to my eyes a lot like the OldPub scene, where the Big Six became the Big Five and are currently the Big Four. As the collapse escalates, the corpse-like state follows corpse-like charachteristics. In this case, it's bloating before imploding.

This is not a good sign, and not just in terms of the core audience of gamers. It's also a bad sign in larger cultural and economic terms, as it means that the collapse in film and television in the West has reached terminal degrees where it cannot exist without Blackrock cutting them checks (and fulfilling the strings attached to those checks).

This means that the same parasites that sucked film, comics, genre fiction, and TV dry have decided to fall upon AAA Gaming in a massive horde and impose their norms all at once, rather than the drip-feed incrementalism that we've suffered to date.

The bad changes that ruined those other media are about to hit AAA Gaming like a truck, making existing problems--such as the financialization and casino-style predation--and you'll wish you were sent to another world as a consequence of that impact.

Expect that Western gaming will be trash at the AAA tier going forward, meaning that only old games, Western Indies and Japanese games will be worth your time and money.

Yes, there will be a few exceptions here and there like Ghosts of Tsushima, but the rule remains "Don't Give Money To People That Hate You". Track where the money goes; if a bad actor gets any of it, don't buy it. You personally, the culture generally, and gaming in the long run is better off for maintaining this discipline despite the price.