Don’t look now, not when you read this sentence, but there’s something sitting on the TV cabinet. It’s a box, and it purrs when you put a finger against it. It’s inviting, it’s sleek, it may be matte or glossy. It may have a number of parts it’ll break off just so you can play with them in your hands. It’s powered by a charge running through a copper and latex tail that runs deep inside of it. You can watch it, play with it, talk to your friends through it. It’s so happy to be there, a part of your house, a part of your family. All of your friends can be found there, through the Games For Windows Live service, just another market platform for the bounty of Microsoft to get into the desperate, clutching, drooling mouths of gamers everywhere.

Microsoft’s in the papers again, a months long litigation battle drawn out over whether or not the chimera-like merger of parts between Activision/Blizzard and Microsoft™ can be allowed to process, a not so uncertain clasping of hands and melding of hearts that is sure to benefit everyone in the gameosphere.

It’s not the first time Microsoft has been in the papers over a supreme court case. In the 90’s, back in those halcyon days when Silicon Valley hadn’t yet exploded with the cultural fervor and detritus it has now, eager to slip as many fingers into as many pies as it possibly could, there was the simple act that Microsoft packaged their flagship operating system, Windows 95,(?) with Internet Explorer: this was, according to gates and co, simply a necessary evil for the consumer, and he fired at the supreme court Justice and lawyers who’d dare imply that it took choice out of the hands of customers: It was a bad look for Microsoft execs, who days earlier had submitted falsified tapes alledging Internet Explorer being removed could cause machines running the windows OS to perform poorly
(https://web.archive.org/web/20110115024801/http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/1999/02/17689)

In backrooms and emails, Microsoft staff traded jabs and barbs about the fate of competitors if Microsoft would include Internet Explorer in the package that contained the operating system. In a series of emails once brought to the stand, then Senior Vice-President James E. Allchin matched wits with a colleague named Jonathan Roberts, quoted, “An integrated browser makes Netscape a nonissue — a superfluous product for all but the most committed Netscape user, “ It’s all just distruption, it’s all just innovation, all the way down right up and through today tomorrow and maybe the next day. It’s funny, it has me laughing like a real riot that we’re circling the drain again.
(https://web.archive.org/web/19991103171910/http://www.businessweek.com/microsoft/updates/up90203a.htm)

What’s the story with the merger? Well, it’s that time old tale that happens every time one of these big mergers goes through. It’s somebodies loss, but not the company itself: Microsoft immediately cut 1,900 permenant staff members from positions through Activision/Blizzard, who chose a slash through the middle instead of a hyphen so we wont read bad divorce proceedings and “who gets the kids” into their past histories of pulling in and cutting labor from studios, like with what happened during their brief time merged with Bungie.

Bobby Kotick, if you’ve never met the man, has a dispassionate rictus grin not unlike a bloated corpse that’s floated up to the top of a lake, long ago plunged below in some mafia turn gone-wrong but snapped at the ankles and washed back up to the surface world to be all of our problems. Phil Spencer himself, one tracksuit away from being a third string Soprano’s cast member, spokesman cum-XBOX Chief who could be an alternate universe Pizza Franchise CEO, or an, off, off broadway production of a Steve Job’s Biopic named for the rank smell that followed the tech-company CEO everywhere he went (including into his grave) for packing his intestines only with raw fruit. The strange dietary scruples of the rich and famous is almost never a bad conversation to bring up at a party, try it with some strangers sometime this year if you can.

The merger’s a hot one, because rarely do these things hit a court without some type of dirty laundry beind aired out. Emails, Text Exchanges, and most harrowing at all: Financial Reports. Eagle-eyed news watchers might tout that Microsoft was forced to reveal they’ve never actually turned a profit off of a hardware sale, but that’s just the name of the game in the good old gaming industry: it’s those hot exclusives, it’s those peripherals. All of those peripherals, luxury models, gold filigree, I even hear they pitched and X-Box that could give two family members at once a proper wank, if they desired.

Microsoft wanted Nintendo, Valve, well, just about anyone they could get their grubby little corporate hands on. It’s all good for the consumer in the end, you see, it’s about…well, It’s about taking Call of Duty away from their competitors if their direct actions on acquiring companies most un-hyphenated if what they’ve given the public to go by is true. What’s the console wars, that innocent little term we all used on online forums to notate the fervored rush with which the gamer identity was raised to roost alongside an almost patriotic sense of corporate stewardship, looking like now? FTC Trials and acquisitions, mergers and layoff. Ballooning development costs that close smaller studios left and right. Uncertain futures where even indie darlings aren’t safe, someone’s out there with a rifle and a scope prowling through the underbrush looking to turn that next immersive sim or farming game into a mass-marketable hit that can be played forever.

There’s no smoking gun or falsified tapes in the last acquisition that went down really. Just a mugging for the camera “we’re all just honest guys” article published by the official Microsoft press wing, again, days before they’d start shuttering heaps of employees. To bring that number into focus, 1,900 people across Activision/Blizzard and then some more through whatever hierarchy of teams is part of XBOX infrastructure lost their jobs. It’s a hit that would’ve been more sore during the holidays, but nonetheless has everybody back at town talking about Microsoft.

“Gaming is the most dynamic and exciting category in entertainment across all platforms today and will play a key role in the development of metaverse platforms,” said Satya Nadella, chairman and CEO, Microsoft. “We’re investing deeply in world-class content, community and the cloud to usher in a new era of gaming that puts players and creators first and makes gaming safe, inclusive and accessible to all.” – (https://news.microsoft.com/2022/01/18/microsoft-to-acquire-activision-blizzard-to-bring-the-joy-and-community-of-gaming-to-everyone-across-every-device/)

In hallowed tablets of corporate PR speak, I always hinge on the word “to all” and something starts crawling under my skin like one of those novels by transwomen where something fucked up happens to a body every page, a real version of it. An image of an anonymous person in a suit jacket, holding a gun to my head and bringing exclusive and interactive content directly to me, wherever I am, to whoever every body is. It’s not enough to know Microsoft with my eyes, I need to know their brand with my body.

At the time of the Activision/Acquisition FTC hearing, Spencer was quoted as saying

“Every time we ship a game on PlayStation… Sony captures 30 percent of the revenue that we do on their platform and then they use that money among other revenue that they have to do things to try to reduce Xbox’s survival on the market. We try to compete, but as I said, over the last 20 years we’ve failed to do that effectively. “

Microsoft just doesn’t have enough, you see, nobody does. It’s a scaling ladder of ranked competition with no failure, only the word “competition” doesn’t so much imply an outing of good sportsmanship, but a pitched, bloody battle where the people who push the shit to market get turned on in the end, a debtors war of libel and sales figures encircling and turning everything into a Market to capture Numbers. More consoles, more homes, more players, more money. It’s strictly business, and is it wrong to hate Microsoft for being simply Too Good at business? That they should need even more and more business, always, that simply having to know that other companies exist is almost too much to fathom, a straw on a camel’s back that only leads to a gutwrenching heartbreak of everyone at the top. When the next consoles launch, we should do our part and remember, it’s not enough to be most places, it’s only enough to be everything. Lock your doors.