Another week has come and gone, the Xbox ABK merger still is the main topic of social media. Xbox fans find themselves on social media, reviewing the latest developments in court. In particular the company’s ongoing appeal of the CMAs decision.

Xbox fans are super hyped for a corporate merger. Why? What is it doing for you as customers? I wanted to compile a list of compelling arguments for it.

I’m not going to tread over the popular reasons again. The whole Xbox will get the big or existing franchises exclusively, or they will launch on GamePass day one has been debunked. Not only by execs but, by just looking at the financials. Nor will I be looking at the current quality issues.

I’ve seen some people say that it would allow ABK to bring back older franchises. That has never been said or suggested by anyone at MS or ABK. If they wanted to bring Prototype, GUN, SoF, Singularity or TimeShift back or make a sequel, they would have done so. ABK moved forward with microtransactions and services. The Crash and Spyro remakes were exceptions. Even then they tried putting microtransactions into Crash Team Racing. Toys for Bob were and still are splitting teams and time helping with Call of Duty.

The rest of those devs aren’t going anywhere. In fact, they’re about to have more to do. MS signed a deal to keep Call of Duty on Nintendo consoles for 10 years. That means devs have another version to port and it could cause the game to be held back, as multiplats have to cater to the lowest spec machine. The Wii, Wii U and Switch were the weakest consoles of their generation

The next positive depends on the player. If the ABK deal goes through, those old games could come to GamePass. I play old games all the time and I‘d like that. However that’s a minority of people and that would still be a ripoff. Your paying a minimum of $120 a year to play old games you can buy for $3-$10on eBay or a local mom and pop. Many of which are on back compat.

I want to say, some people said they’ll be able to play ABK games in the cloud. There already is a CoD mobile game and a small minority of people stream games to their phones. I’m not so sure that’s a positive. The biggest argument against cloud streaming is its latency, even on Wi-Fi. Those data connection’s signal strength fluctuates. Not to mention the added latency for playing online.

Another reason people could be hyped is that like Bethesda, there could be an unannounced/ new IP they would make exclusive and launch it on GamePass. Redfall and HiFi Rush were both GamePass launches. The former was……s……a GamePass game and the other was a decent AA that folks raved about, but no one played and it flopped.

So the benefits for why everyone wants the ABK merger to go through are…..I don’t know…….