the never-ending saga of corporate fortunes and unlimited growth welcomes the final chapter of gaming cultures New World Order: the corporate wars 2.0.
neocons like Tencent, Sony, FB etc. r aggressively competing for market control, be it lawsuits, acquisitions or tech. the result is the ever-same since capitalisms introduction: the unification of a market by corporate infrastructure, where the audience (and esp. their expectations) is controlled via political narratives.
MS acquisition of ActiBlizz is optimal damagecontrol and will not only marginalise the Unionisation efforts of ActiBlizz workforce, but rebrand WoW, MS and gaming culture as a whole. as those corporate wars r simply a proxy of Klassenkampf. where gaming culture once was a broad field of indies, studios and companies competing for the audience attention its now stagnating into a stock market index and thus being controlled by too-big-to-fail money like Blackrock, State-Street Corp and Vanguard Group (whose investments exclusively project the current index, while having invested in each other. this is real market control, when the big players dont need to directly coordinate (insider trade), but all have the same portfolio). whenver those join a market the competition is over. as they not only represent, but r the globalized and interconnected capital.
where once democratic processes featured transparency, discourse and market competition, corporate wars will replace them with PR. cuz their market control has already grown beyond any state authority (reason for Chinas assault on national gaming), neocons control the production, the distribution and the wage-dependent workforce, the supply and hence the audience, aka the market.
this audience will chose any side without further impact than a legitimation for this scheme, corporate wars like the Apple/Epic/Google lawsuits r just PR, as no company would risk a potentially economically devastating trial, even in their worst case scenarios profit is the supreme directive - they have already won, no matter how the courts ruling may be.
on a systemic perspective these r all just smoke bombs to diffuse the actual state of wealth distribution into a faux-competition, which isnt competition at all, but the capital exploiting the users, aka workforce. this process is going to escalate over the next years with the prognosed result of increased user engagement, the audience will now not only experience but finance corporate wars 2.0. gaming is already abused as a channel for political engagement, as long as gamers discuss online on workplace conditions, Koticks salary and LGBQT, they might as well buy some rainbows as NFTs with a personal signature of Bill Gates, cuz that wont change anything.
the singular approach to a substantial change is to collectively claim the means of production and revert exploitation into a dignified (re)distribution of power, wealth and security.
