As I would like to have hopefully gotten across through the variety of postings I've made here, I am a nerd that enjoys a wide swath of things. I would say that comic books and video games have by far been the longest running hobby passions of mine that I've indulged in, each has occasionally tagged out to other pursuits, like Magic: the Gathering and, while I've got the wrestling reference just hanging there, yes, professional wrestling consumed me (and let's be honest, a great deal of the country) for most of the back half of the 1990's and early 2000's. 90's wrestling was the highest mark for the sport(s entertainment) for obvious and well-deserved reason. Some of the most energizing, charismatic stars of all time in the industry, such as "Stone Cold" Steve Austin, "2024 Republican Presidential Nominee" Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, "The Heartbreak Kid" Shawn Michaels, and on and on and on rose to prominence in both the wrestling world and the pop culture world at large. It was a heyday for their brand of badassery and flamboyancy and also a glorious transition of the actual in-ring action as wrestlers from all corners of the world, from Japan to Mexico, were influencing up-and-comers such as Chris Jericho, Rob Van Dam, Chris Benoit (I know, I know, we don't say his name) or becoming the influencers like in the cases of Eddie Guerrero, Jushin "Thunder" Liger, and Rey Mysterio Jr. The in-ring performances were growing at leaps and bounds, the "promos" the stars were cutting every show were the stuff of meme legend to the point that they're still quoted today by 50 and 60-somethings that haven't moved on and probably yell at a grocery store clerk once a week because they had the "audacity" to tell them it was store policy to wear a mask right now, and there was just a huge amount of momentum behind the pro wrestling business spurred on by these performers and the vicious, "anything goes" competition driving most of the industry at the time between the World Wrestling Federation (WWF, now WWE) and World Championship Wrestling (WCW).
Everyone loved wrestling; a lot of us lived and breathed wrestling. And then the wrestling industry just kind of shat itself into oblivion with pretty much one man to blame. But it was great for a while there. When WCW came right out and challenged WWF to a programming battle on Monday nights during the "Monday Night War," every week it was just dizzying the amount of one-upmanship that was occurring, the levels that the stories were going to to outdo each other (though, admittedly, some of this material was pure "shock" value in its most abhorrent form), and the in-ring exhibitions the talent was putting each other through on TV and in Pay-Per-View to enthrall the masses. And then it just kind of stopped. WCW at a certain point both kind of just "out shocked" themselves and started putting out derivative storyline after derivative storyline recycling the same "who's the newest member/traitor" gimmick to their New World Order gimmick that really ramped up the fervor and excitement around pro wrestling at the time, but would also contribute heavily to its decline, especially once you had a generational millionaire-turned billionaire like WWF Owner/Inheritor Vince McMahon as the de facto leader of the business.
Unfortunately, the fallout the unfolded in the falling of WCW led to exactly the expected: With no real competition to his company at the time, Vince McMahon leveraged his television presence and money to go out of his way to ensure he wouldn't have any real competition for decades. Any wrestling talent that had a modicum of buzz around them when WCW packed up production went into (now) WWE's coffers. Any wrestling talent building a name for themselves on the Independent circuit went into Vince McMahon's rolodex. Any talent on the international stage that wanted to make their bones in America basically reported to V-Dog or no one at all. Yes, there were the occasional nuisances, like ill-fated Total Nonstop Action (TNA) that was formed around mostly WWE castoffs as the bloated roster from WCW's additions to the ranks resulted in some fat trimming to be done, but for almost twenty years until just recently when the billionaire son of the owner of the Jacksonville Jaguars decided to get him in the game with All Elite Wrestling (AEW) one industry ran through one man because he took his enormous wealth and took the creative talent that made pro wrestling tick and made it exclusively his.
So, when I see a multi-billion dollar video game and tech company throwing billions and billions of dollars to acquire as many software producing studios as they can possibly acquire in the span of just a couple years, excuse me if I don't happen to get a bit of the drizzling shits of "oh, not this BS again."
Obviously, I'm talking about the $7 billion mega purchase of ultra-AAA videogame development studio Bethesda by Microsoft about a week and a half ago. Needless to say, the ramifications of such an aggressive move by one of the three big video games publishers and console producers is just beginning to be felt, but the message was loud and clear up front: When the going gets tough, the tough buys up market share and intellectual properties.
From the shrewdest of shrewd business move standpoints, this absolutely makes sense. Microsoft took an absolute drumming this past gaming generation, with numbers showing that the Playstation 4 outsold the X-Box One by almost two hundred and fifty percent. And while there are many factors that could pertain to exactly why this generation turned out so lackluster to the newest X-console, hands down one of the most glaring ones is that, well, there wasn't much reason to buy one over the offerings of their rivals in Sony and, to a lesser extent, Nintendo. There was simply next to nothing you could buy on a X-Box that you couldn't get on any other console from a gaming software standpoint, as Microsoft had an exclusive showing that was highlighted essentially by your standard expected titles from the publisher - a new Halo, a new Gears of War, and some Forza racing games - and very not much else. Meanwhile, Sony leaned heavily into their own studios they own or have very close relationships with - the Naughty Dogs, Guerrilla Games, Insomniac Games, etc - as well as leveraging their relationships and sales leads to pull some clutch "timed" exclusives and really push the "must own" feel of the console. Nintendo, as always, was more than content to be the place you go to for Mario Bros, Legend of Zelda, and other Nintendo mainstays and has done quite well for themselves, being the number two selling console of the generation despite entering it years after the PS4 and X-Box One launched.
Adding Bethesda to the roll call of their studios now means Microsoft adds titles like the Elder Scrolls series who, for example, their last entry in that lineage, Skyrim, sold 30 million copies alone. And this acquisition isn't coming in "hot" per se, but it is a follow up by Microsoft for a purchasing spree they went on just a couple years ago with essentially the same message; We'll buy ourselves to a reputable lineup. Again, this makes complete business sense on Microsoft's part and I don't think anyone can fault them in that regard. They got buried on exclusives and they, as a company in general, not just the X-Box division, are putting a lot of weight on their Game Pass as a growing point. Microsoft first and foremost will always be a computer company and their Game Pass means infinitely more to the company than just being a console mover; it's a revenue stream that has literally over a billion potential customers worldwide through Windows users on PC and so on.
And that's where I, as a general video game consumer and fan and someone whose fandom of another entertainment medium who watched a industry tentpole with a big bankroll go hog wild locking up a dominance of the market, get a little wary. Also, yes, I am a dedicated Sony Playstation fan, those console have always served me right because of that big advantage of theirs; their dedication to having their own lineup of studios that create consistently fantastic exclusive titles. But that has nothing to do with this particular acquisition from my own personal standpoint. Bethesda was responsible for about two purchases a generation from me given my purchasing habits, while Sony always ropes me for a dozen and that's not changing. The current loss of one publisher means nothing to me personally and, again, it is a completely understandable and legitimate get for Microsoft going forward, all factors considered. But I've seen where this goes.
I remember going from a diehard pro wrestling fan that just LIVED the sport(s entertainment) for a solid decade from mid-90's to the mid-2000's to someone that just dropped the industry for dead as soon as Vince McMahon fully got his mitts on it. I lived for getting to school on Tuesday mornings to talk about the previous night's shenanigans and rallying like-minded friends to each chip in ten bucks and group up to get each Pay-Per-View. I mowed extra lawns to get mail order Extreme Championship Wrestling (ECW) VHS tapes sent to my old, old ass because that was where the really wild stuff happened. And then it was just gone as far as I was concerned because WWE not only succeeded in acquiring all the talent, they then succeeded in turning that talent into one of the most shallow pools of creativity I ever witnessed simply because they didn't have to try. They didn't have to worry about another company beating them because they bought most of the tools that could be used agains them, Vince McMahon just had to worry about beating himself and driving too much of the fanbase away in general that they couldn't make money squaring off again themselves. At least in my case, that was a losing proposition that went on for over a decade.
Again, I don't think that video game nerds worldwide are going to wake up tomorrow and find out that Microsoft has hovered up another thirty software developers and Sony and Nintendo will basically exist to make their own games... but isn't that what Microsoft will inch towards? Seven billion dollars to acquire such a large studio is at the same time not chump change to be throwing around in the video game market, but it's also a proverbial drop in the bucket for a company like Microsoft on the whole if they really want to push that Game Pass long game. Like I said earlier, literally something like one-in-six people on the planet run their consoles or computers through a Microsoft operating system. What if Microsoft throws enough money around, acquires enough studios, and makes their Game Pass lineup so undeniable that, say, ten percent of those MS users sign up for the $120 it costs annually? That's twelve BILLION dollars in revenue annually. That's a Bethesda and a half just in one year, though that’s just talking gross sales and rough napkin math. But is that not worth it? If buying a Bethesda a year for the next five years means you're looking at a gross of nine digits a decade on the way to establishing gaming software dominance, how do you not pull that trigger? That's just basic business building; if you can spend the money and the revenues are there, you go spend that money and you grab that slice of the pie.
Obviously there's hoops to jump through, supposedly. There will be anti-trust laws and merger acquisition procedures and blah blah blah. Let's be serious though and acknowledge that in this day and age of hyper capitalism none of that matters. Look at how stifled our Internet access is in this country, with basically a handful of companies running the broadband show nationwide, with large swaths of land covered by only one or two of them at a time with no real semblance of competition to be had, meaning the quality usually sucks, the customer service usually sucks, and the prices aren't much better. Because the arguments will be the same as they are for any oligopoly industry; there's just enough oddball small "local actors" enough other big tertiary companies touching that industry that there's enough "competition" happening to look the other way. Google is laying fiber now so that's a whole fourth company in the national mix on Internet, that's good enough. They even tried their hands at a video game streaming service once upon a time so, y'know, of course there's a "healthy" rivalry base. As long as something like a Steam still exists and you have college kids grinding away in their dorms to put their home brews to markets like it and, of course, the lobbying money is good, legislators who get paid to decide if big money is going too far will look away from a company like Microsoft sucking up developers like Spaceballs vacuuming up Planet Druidia's air.
All of that above is just "end game" speak though, in a world where MS has spent their way to dominance. I'm being over reactive and somewhat spastic to focus on that considering the X-Box currently is the definitive loser this rapidly passing generation. We're not in the "Vince McMahon is swimming naked in his spoils" stage of the industry but in the Monday Night Wars stage, and the thing about that battle was the escalation, which was as thrilling as it was destructive. Talent was being pulled from all points on the globe to satiate WCW and WWF's need for freshness to fight their battle, and it was glorious while it lasted, but that furthered wrecked an Indy scene that really didn't have much way in the legs back then, hell, it straight up murdered ECW as WWF pulled from the talent so much to the point they just bought the company after the strain was too much. My point here is, what is to stop the same escalation of arms from occurring as Microsoft and Sony come to similar blows? My first reaction to this Bethesda purchase, aside from the undeniable moment of "oh shit, that's huge," was an immediate "well then, who does Sony buy in response?" If you're Sony and you just got handed the news that you're just not going to be able to promote two of the biggest gaming franchises in the business in the Fallout and Elder Scrolls titles, wouldn't the first reaction be as one of the money men in the company to call a meeting and debate the merits of a retort? For example, the company has been really close to Capcom the past few years to the point of basically funding Street Fighter V, what's the downside in this new normal to just throwing $2 billion at them and locking up having Resident Evil, Street Fighter, and freaking Monster Hunter in your ranks as a retaliation? Why not go full Japanophile and snag SquareEnix while at it, wrap up Final Fantasy check books are being opened? Hell, it’s not like they’ve been innocent this whole time, when buzz was hitting its peak for No Man’s Sky, they put their money and stamp on it to capitalize and made that launch a debacle in its own right
It took nearly twenty years for pro wrestling to "recover" from the fallout of fallout of a two company war that featured pocketbooks as much as it did creativity. And I put those apostrophes around the r-word in that last sentence because the ratings for your average WWE program as the war was breaking wide open for the company was pushing someone like 8 million viewers. Now even the company that "won," through years of self-inflicted stagnations, gets more like 3 million viewers a show. And despite as much energy and enthusiasm their biggest "competition" in that time frame, AEW, has garnered in the past year, even they basically only get a little over a million to tune into their live show every Wednesday. Now, there is hope around that company because their ratings draw VERY well with a younger crowd which is where pro wrestling has been really hurting during this post-war wasteland - a significant amount of wrestling fans identify in a 50+ age range, meaning they hopped on during the "Monday Night Wars" and have mostly stuck around - but the damage of this was obvious and it's that pro wrestling went from being the talk of school hallways and water coolers every Tuesday morning twenty years ago and launching the careers of one of the biggest movie stars of all time, to a niche product that is BEGGING people to get their grandkids interested in to build some momentum into this next decade.
Again, I know a ton of that comparison word soup above is not exactly "good faith" arguing and I'm not saying I'm pretending it is. For one, as big as pro wrestling was in its biggest years it WISHES it had anything resembling what an average year looks like for how many people and how much money interacts with the video game industry today. WWE's current net value isn't even what Microsoft paid for Bethesda, and that's after a couple deals with Fox for broadcasting rights of one of their shows and a Saudi prince who, y'know, had one of our journalists murdered because Vince McMahon hangs out with the best people, put a billion-plus dollars into their coffers. As of 2018, $43 billion was spent on video games in the US alone; the markets aren't even comparable. Except, you would think with that kind of money out there there would be more than just three company pushing consoles and then a couple more on top of that pushing streaming services like Microsoft's Game Pass, the Stadia experiment that Google is running, Steam, and whatever other software publishers are hosting their products online via a client of their own. And that's because video games are still an exorbitantly cost intensive market to get into and not many companies the combination of money, software expertise, or just the simple desire to get into a fistfight with such entrenched rivals, especially one with pockets as deep as a company like Microsoft.
And that's why I feel like eerily like I did near two decades ago when a product I deeply loved was at its absolute best, before it dragged itself to absolute lows. Video games are arguably the best they've ever been between the power of the tech, big AAA developmental studios and folks in their basements alike pushing themselves to make something epic in their own rights, and the investment level of time you can put into a digital world you love and enjoy can be nearly limitless. But you can see the cracks forming a bit. Those worlds are costly to build and maintain, so when companies find one that enthralls the masses they will do ANYTHING to keep them on that high. Diminishing returns are at an all time high. Big pockets and mergers sucking up the talent are primary weapons of war. It's pretty much never been a better time to be a gamer, and that's why I'm getting a little anxious to see where we go from here, because I've been here before.
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