Game Pass Ultimate includes Xbox Live Gold and EA Play. So it's like PSNow ($60/yr) + PSPlus ($60/yr)+ EA Play ($30/yr).

Game Pass Ultimate is $180/yr (or you can get up to 3 years for $180 if you do the Xbox Live Gold upgrade). The rough equivalent on PlayStation is $150/yr.

Of course, Game Pass Ultimate includes day-one releases, monthly perks and PC support, which the Sony offering doesn't have.

One major reason Halo was so successful was because it was the game to buy with your new Xbox, and it took full advantage of things like the hard drive and built-in ethernet for system link capability. On PS2, it would have been just another game by a developer you'd never heard of (unless you had a Mac), with no system link and much smaller, claustrophobic levels thanks to no hard drive to cache data on. It's hard to imagine it would have achieved anywhere close to the same success on PS2 that it did on Xbox.

The worst potential outcome from this anti-trust review is some kind of ruling that orders ABK not to restrict content from competing platforms it has historically supported (meaning PlayStation) for 5-10 years or something. But they'll still let the deal go through.

Without Xbox, I imagine Bungie would have continued languishing in obscurity making games for MacOS, at least until Apple decided to basically abandon the MacOS gaming market.

The Microsoft/Activision deal will sail through. Microsoft can point to several reasons why it won't pose an anti-trust threat. They didn't yank Minecraft from competing platforms when they bought Mojang. They didn't yank Deathloop and Ghostwire Tokyo when they bought Bethesda. And the single biggest property in the Activision/Blizzard/King portfolio, Candy Crush, is primarily a mobile game that sells on platforms that Microsoft does not control.

Sony can't afford Konami. Konami makes tons of money selling pachinko and slot machines, along with Bemani games.

Shit, this reminds me that Activision owns the rights to Blur. If Microsoft brings that franchise back and hands it to Playground Games... I'm nursing a chub just thinking about it. 😁

That doesn't mean those franchises don't carry any weight. If Microsoft announces a new, AAA Starcraft or Warcraft game exclusive to Game Pass platforms, it will absolutely move the needle.

Let's not be too hasty. Microsoft bought Mojang, and Minecraft is still available on all gaming platforms. And it's possible that Sony still has an exclusive content deal for Call of Duty, which would mean that it would still come to PlayStation, at least for a while.

Warcraft and Starcraft are still huge franchises.