If this is true it could spell serious long term disater for Sony. MS controlling Blizzard, Sierra, and Universal Interactive gives them control over numerous huge franchises. Diablo, Warcraft, Half-life et. al., Crash Bandicoot, Spyro, lots of good selling movie licenses (whether the games are crap or not). Even with PC gamers comprising many of the users for the first few it isn't a huge stretch to see MS positioning those games for the next version of the Xbox and Xbox Live. It might not seem like much now but 3 years down the road it could be the nail in Sony's coffin as the dominant player. I am a huge Sony fan but their games are growing more and more lackluster while Xbox admittedly is strengthening its position for the online realm which is where it matters. A few years from now when the next generation of consoles hits I am afriad Sony will have already lost the war even if they have better hardware. Xbox may suck now but it certainly won't next time round, especially if it becomes just another machine on a home network (i.e. games you can play on your PC or Xbox because it is all just one big service.) Really, only a handful of Japanese companies are likely to avoid Xbox and that isn't enough to maintain Sony's dominance if MS brings almost every other major franchise into its fold (which is what this buyout would effectively entail). Sony had better hope that EQ I,II,Adventures/Planetside/Star Wars Galaxies as a single service is enough to compete because they have nothing else. A damn shame because their console has traditionally had tons of fun interesting games to play.

This comment was edited on Jan 22, 17:46.