No single exclusive is as large as the best selling video game in the world today on consoles.
I’m pretty sure if someone big* bought Take 2 these days they’d have to make some sort of commitment about GTA.
- By which I mean a big platform holder, not, say Embracer (unless they have announced a console/streaming platform?)
Yes. I think that’s true.
It’s not just about CoD. That’s a big part of it, but it’s not just that. Blizzard used to be a Really Big Deal until their internal politics got exposed. If Microsoft can resurrect Starcraft, for example, that could be enormous. Diablo 4 may very well be a big seller (I personally think the action RPG fad is over and it’s gonna dissappoint, but we’ll see).
Microsft had no good developers going into this console gen. Rare hasn’t done shit since Sea of Thieves and while I love that game, it is not a blockbuster. Acquiring Bethesda and now Activision is how they plan to compete with Sony and Nintendo, both of which turn out multiple fist party games each year that are huge successes. Games move hardware. Games sell subscriptions. Microsoft is behind the other two on all of that.
It is just about CoD, in that it’s all Sony and various governments keep talking about.
It’s absolutely the Consumer’s Right to Teabag. There’s no real angle as far as creating a monopoly or something when Sony is crushing Microsoft on units sold and stuff. No way this acquisition reverses that.
While it’s obviously not an exact breakdown of revenue versus value, Activision’s revenue is closer to a third of the entities and there’s more in there than just CoD.
What I don’t understand is if no one thinks that this acquisition will make Microsoft suddenly dominant in its competition with Sony, what’s the problem?
It seems like most of these arguments are along the lines of, “this action would hurt Sony in its competition with Microsoft,” but isn’t that the case with pretty much any action taken in the course of competition?
If this act were to make Microsoft more even in terms of its overall position with Sony, that seems like that would make the overall market MORE competitive, not less.
Well, the UK did manage to mention World of Warcraft. :p
I didn’t go digging into so I don’t know if they think MS would stop shipping WoW for Mac or something.
I’m sure all 15 of those players would be furious.
Yeah, there is a fine line between competition and non-competitive practices. I think that it is really hard, on its face, to look at the 3rd place console maker buying a company to increase their sales to better compete and catch up is “anti-competitive”.
But, this is an acquisition of a magnitude we have not seen before, so it does need to be scrutinized and pushed back on.
I still think this goes through, but I think Microsoft’s dreams of this passing through without some concessions is gone.
Maybe this deal goes through with the acquisition spinning off Activision into a separate company with Microsoft taking Blizzard/King. Or Blizzard splits off, or King etc.
But, looking through the portfolio in this deal, the only thing, console wise, that makes sense to bother buying is Call of Duty. Having that as part of Microsoft’s gamepass offering is a huge seller to their ecosystem.
I do think, though, with the upcoming release of Diablo 4, as well as the very positive reception of World of Warcraft: Dragonflight, having those be part of game-pass would be a huge incentive as well. Not to mention if they can push the mobile games as part of gamepass as well (ad free versions etc).
I downloaded the entire “Provisional findings report.” It’s 275 pages long, which killed my plan to read the whole thing, but I did do some term searches and poke around a bit.
This is definitely a battle over CoD. The report uses the full title “Call of Duty” 25 times, and the designated abbreviation for it, “CoD” appears 629 times.
For comparison, “World of Warcraft” is mentioned 10 times, and its designated abbreviation “WoW” appears 13 times. WoW is only discussed in a vague way about how it might have an impact on cloud gaming as that market grows. The preliminary report is focused on CoD and the impacts of its acquisition on gaming consoles (and to a lesser extent, on cloud gaming). So it flat-out says WoW is not relevant to the console analysis, but Activision’s PC games, “may be important for cloud gaming services, thereby adding to Activision’s already strong catalogue in this market.”
The juicy facts on sales, revenue, sales ranking, etc., are all redacted (using a cute little scissors icon I’ve never seen before, let’s see if I can copy-paste it here, I’m guessing “no”: []). That’s because most of that data comes from internal documents provided primarily by Microsoft and Activision. The redactions are so extensive that it makes the parts of the report I did want to read basically useless. The report’s conclusions are based on these numbers, so it is impossible to know if those conclusions are reasonable when the foundations of those conclusions are missing.
UK government processes tend to be a lot more sensitive to commercial confidentiality than in the US, say, and a lot less open in general (our FOIA is basically useless as there are so many carve-outs). Even if this gets contested and goes to court I wouldn’t be surprised if arguments involving those numbers were heard behind closed doors.
Speaking of non-merger interventions in tech:
That seems crazy. It’s anticompetitive to have an allegedly worse browser requirement on your OS? Even if the allegations are true, wouldn’t Apple just lose out to their competitors because of it?
Looks like more positioning to try to appease the concerns about the merger.
Deal also signed with nVidia
Interesting. I wonder how that works? I’ve only used GeForce Now to try it out once, and it was all about using Steam on a remote machine, with me logged into my Steam account. Maybe Microsoft has something similar through the Windows store or something?
Or maybe they just mean that they will have access through Steam?
Most likely yes, GeForce Now only streams games where the rights owner explicitly permits it because Nvidia is a bunch of wussies.
Note the Nintendo agreement says titles will release day and date with Xbox/PC with full content feature parity. Unless the Switch 2 releases pretty darn quick and offers (minimally!) Steam Deck performance, that is quite simply not technically possible. My guess is MS will stream those games on Switch.
There are three things I want from ActiBlizz.
- Tony Hawks Pro Skater 1+2 Remaster on Steam
- Tony Hawks Pro Skater 3+4 DLC
- Diablo on Steam
I fancy my chances of getting any of these 3 things under Microsoft’s watch more than I do from ActiBlizz staying independent with their… bizarre business decisions. Why isn’t Sony considering this net win for me personally here?