Probably shouldn’t let Sony buy bungie either. Destiny is pretty big.
You know. For the consumers.
There’s a vast difference between a single development studio and a massive company with a large amount of products across multiple platforms.
So it’s cool for the company that’s already bigger, to get even bigger.
It’s cool.
Your replies are ridiculous on this topic.
You just want more games on Game Pass. That’s all it’s about for you, so no matter what the outcome, unless you get what you want, you’re not going to be happy. That’s cool. It also means there is no discussion to be had with you on the topic.
It’s just funny to watch the overt hypocrisy.
I’m against consolidation overall. Sony buying Bungie was anticompetitive. Absolutely.
MS buying Activision is far worse.
Short-term, sure, Game Pass gets better, yay. I have GP myself. Long-term, you can’t play a bunch of games on their competitor’s systems, they drop the loophole, and Game Pass gets much more restrictive and/or expensive.
If Microsoft simply wanted Activision games on GP, they could make that happen without spending sixty-nine billion dollars. They could even get Activision games as exclusives. Of course they’d be competing (there’s the word of the day!) with Sony to do it. By purchasing Activision outright MS ensures those games will only be available on their console, forever.
And yes, of course that would have included Call of Duty. Everything MS said about CoD was bullshit. If they could get away with it, CoD would only be available on Xbox and Windows. You don’t see Starfield on Playstation, do ya?
Microsoft is in last place. The idea that they’ll
have a monopoly on gaming is laughable. Sony is the market leader, by almost 50% I think.
The MS line was that the agreement was that for 10 years they would keep the base COD game multiplatform. They were being very clear that it would not be funny business, and that the PS version of COD would have parity with the xbox version.
I guess we will see where this goes. I am on the fence, because I would really like to not have Bobby Kotick in control of any games companies anymore, but also, business consolidation is bad for consumers (mostly).
It is a really difficult thing to quantify though. Bringing more titles to game-pass, as well as re-organizing the leadership at a studio well known for mistreating its employees is good for consumers and developers.
Long term, if it hurts Sony, that does damage to the competition and innovation we see between both brands. I would like Sony to take a hit now, because they have done such a piss poor job this generation, and their game-pass alternative is bad, but there still should be at least 3 console companies around. (I guess 4 now with Valve? Kinda?) Right now, I kind of see Sony as some elephant in the room refusing to make any sort of moves towards the future of cloud gaming and games as service, and rather than innovating themselves, focusing on pushing customers to do business their way.
But we also need to think long term outside of this Sony/Microsoft spat. One of the biggest parts of this purchase for Microsoft was because they have basically 0 presence in the mobile gaming space. Their acquisition of King would fix that.
Right now, we have other companies like tencent, netease and other foreign firms as juggernauts in that space, and Microsoft is trying to make a purchase now to keep up in that market.
The focus has been on CoD, because that is something that gamers know, but the real diamond in the tiara of Activision has been Candy Crush Saga.
I wonder if this lawsuit gets resolved with Microsoft agreeing to purchase and then sell/spin off Activision as a separate company, with Call of Duty. If they can get a purchase structured with King and Blizzard, it might be harder for the complaints Sony has been making to stick.
So if it is anticompetitive to have microsoft become the 3rd largest game publisher in the world, that, per se, means that #1 and #2 are anticompetitive, too, and should be broken up, right? Or is the FTC going with “oh well, they get grandfathered in”?
It just seems weird to ignore the current status quo, while implicitly admitting that #1 and #2 have unfair competitive advantages that the FTC won’t do anything about and also won’t let the market do anything about (e.g., via this merger).
It’s a world with Amazon.com and Walmart.com, but the FTC decides that Overstock can’t buy Yahoo Shopping because that would make Overstock too big and anti-competitive. Maybe that’s true under the current law, but it kind of begs the questions on the other two.
It’s interesting that the FTC cites this in their post as one of their arguments:
In a complaint issued today, the FTC pointed to Microsoft’s record of acquiring and using valuable gaming content to suppress competition from rival consoles, including its acquisition of ZeniMax, parent company of Bethesda Softworks (a well-known game developer). Microsoft decided to make several of Bethesda’s titles including Starfield and Redfall Microsoft exclusives despite assurances it had given to European antitrust authorities that it had no incentive to withhold games from rival consoles.
Was this some private assurance? I don’t see anything in the public record of this. In fact, the only mentions I find in the news/announcements about the Bethesda purchase specifically say MS agreed to keep all current (for that time) games and contracts on other consoles, honor any pending exclusives (Deathloop) but upcoming games would be on a case-by-case basis.
I suppose it must have been private, yes. That’s a hell of a point right there.
I am sure this point will come up as part of the lawsuit. Would like to see the FTC’s sauce on that.
Isn’t Sony #1? Lollll
Microsoft could use its ownership over Activision titles to raise prices, or to try to funnel players to gaming platforms it controls, such as Xbox or Windows, the FTC said.
Ah yes, this would drastically undercut Sony and Nintendo’s personal computing OS divisions.
Sorry, I gotta get back to streaming game-pass games on my linux device.
I would use my Samsung TV to stream xbox games, but I prefer being able to be handheld on my Apple or Sony owned phones.
But I guess Microsoft has that locked down now.
Yes. Tencent is #2 and Nintendo is currently #3 and Microsoft is #4. This merger would swap Microsoft and Nintendo, but that seems underwhelming. I can follow (though I don’t agree with) stusser’s stance of “I don’t like any mergers”, but that isn’t how anti-trust laws work. I just don’t get how the FTC can do this and not see any problem with #1 and #2.
Like I said, this means a lot more to GAMERS™ than most other consumers. Right now, Microsoft is 4th in line behind a company that is not a competitor and a (mostly) mobile games company. CoD is small potatoes compared to some of the games Tencent owns.
It seems that the FTC is making a lot of claims that Microsoft will use this acquisition to become more anti-competitive, not that the purchase in itself makes them the #1 company.
Clearly, allowing Microsoft to become the #3 player is unfair to the #1 player.
Seriously, let’s be real here. Sony is exerting this pressure to limit their own competition, which is hilariously ironic.
Yes, and that’s not unreasonable. Almost any merger will be “more anti-competitive”, but unless you’re on the stusser bandwagon, the law isn’t “we bar all actions that make things more anti-competitive.” Rather, it is “some level of anti-competitiveness” is not acceptable. Which seems reasonable. For me, one of the key issues is whether, post-merger, Microsoft will be more anti-competitive than #1 and #2. If not, why are we okay with #1 and #2 and, if yes, how can that be the case when they would only be #3?
Well, this is something they will have to prove in court, if they want this merger to be blocked.
If they have solid reasoning as well as intelligence and data saying that Microsoft’s acquisition will be anti-competitive in the future, I would love to see it, and if true it should be blocked.
Right now, face value, this merger does not scream anti-competitive to me, as it honestly feels more like being “competitive” to catch up with their rivals. That is, if you are just looking at revenue numbers and figures.
Is there anything explicitly anti-competitive about being #1 or 2 in the market? It seems to me that being #1 in the market is different than being anti-competitive. Steam has 50-70% of the entire market share of PC game downloads, but so long as they don’t make anti-competitive moves (i.e., buying out competitors), they can’t be sued by the FTC.