The real issue is Sony has many exclusives which gives Microsoft a better case (despite the judge saying it's NOT about Sony).
It certainly harms consumers, so I don't see how the court still approved this especially with the judge's comment against the comparison to Sony. Almost all mergers of this size harm consumers, the fact that it's allowed by default is the crucial issue.
If the FTC still had a spine they would go after all of these kinds of exclusive deals - and not just limited to games.
The film industry was famously broken up such that the production companies couldn't own theaters yet in 2023 that rule (if it still exists) is so weak that most production companies have their streaming service and aggressively pressure theaters into exclusivity Windows.
At the end of the day this only strengthens the trend to PC gaming which only benefits Microsoft and can only hurt Sony. It would only be a minor surprise if Sony joined the Proton/WINE effort with Valve to get around Microsoft exclusives. (Which does help consumers but in a 3D chess kind of way).
It is a very weird coincidence that every major film studio started streaming services after that law ended. I thought it was more general like a cut between production and distribution not production and theatres.
Now we are in the same position as a hundred years ago. At that time you would have to go into a theatre by the production company and now you have to go to the streaming service of the production company.
That split between production and distribution has to come back.
> That split between production and distribution has to come back.
What if Netflix had made and won that argument before 2020 to prevent production companies from also streaming content? I think Netflix missed a trick here.
But then it wouldn't have been long before competitors emerged in the market threatening Netflix's content deals. I believe only way to reinforce their position was to make their own content.
I mean, if theatres weren't utterly destroyed by COVID something may have actually happened with theatres. But investing in a theatre in the current decade is like investing in cable at this point.
The only coincidence is this repeal happening during a time where it mattered least.
> At the end of the day this only strengthens the trend to PC gaming which only benefits Microsoft and can only hurt Sony.
Microsoft and Sony aren't the only companies making video games.
Windows isn't the only PC operating system.
In large part thanks to Steam, a lot of video games work on Linux nowadays.
Sony is free to implement their OS in such a way that you can play PC games on Playstation. Of course Sony doesn't want that, because it is Sony's strategy to wall off their ecosystem.
SONY IS THE BAD GUY HERE.
Strengthening PC market is a good news for consumers. Strengthening Microsoft - not necessarily…
Sony sells their hardware at a loss or break even, why would they then let you use a PlayStation in "PC" mode so Valve or Microsoft get royalties instead?
I don't. Computer games take a huge amount of intellectual effort to make, does printer ink? (maybe at some point yes, but certainly not now!)
Edit: Though maybe you're talking flappy bird and I'm talking triple-A, actually impressive boundary pushing game. We may just be talking past one another
I disagree with the opinion that it harms consumers. The economist has an article it recently published that argues that this deal actually helps consumers by speeding up the transition to "streaming" games and cloud gaming as an option. I tend to agree. Just because one large company is buying another large company doesn't mean the deal should be blocked.
It's not the Boogeyman you think it is. You used to have to buy a game for $60 and if you didn't like it? Well too bad, that's $60 down the drain. Now you can just move on to the next one. I get that for enthusiasts owning a physical game may be more desirable, but for the majority of gamers (casual gamers) a subscription based service is a better option.
> It's not the Boogeyman you think it is. You used to have to buy a game for $60 and if you didn't like it? Well too bad, that's $60 down the drain. Now you can just move on to the next one. I get that for enthusiasts owning a physical game may be more desirable, but for the majority of gamers (casual gamers) a subscription based service is a better option.
Moving from an ownership model to a rental model is very anti-consumer.
So, sure, some people prefer to rent their couch. That's fine. You're effectively arguing that couch ownership should be forbidden.
You are going to have to provide a more compelling argument that "Well, I play every game only once, for 90m, before moving on to the next, so we should enforce my preference onto everybody!"
The majority of gamers don't play more than a handful of games in a year. There's just no time. You find a game you're into, your pour most of your hours into that game.
>Moving from an ownership model to a rental model is very anti-consumer.
In that case the consumers have worked against their best interests for decades in other mediums. You can even argue as such in the PC market where physical media has also lost.
>some people prefer to rent their couch. That's fine. You're effectively arguing that couch ownership should be forbidden.
in the same way in that you can still buy a CD or even record of a recent song, I'm sure you'll have physical media for quite a while.
But we should also face reality and realize that most people are fine renting media, so it should be no surprise if companies start to tailor towards the majority.
>You are going to have to provide a more compelling argument
If the players have fun, that's all that really matters. Remember that many of these aren't people who would magically jump in and play Skyrim if the mobile industry suddenly disappeared, even if Skyrim was given to them. It's a completely different audience.
Once again, this is deluxe entertainment, and the overall impact of spending more money on a hobby isn't the end of the world. I'm not going to judge how others use their free time and disposable income.
>Your argument was that it is more beneficial for players to pay many times the price of any game they play often.
No it wasn't. My arugment is that this is what players are doing already. I don't care about how you feel about gaming habits. My only point in replying to you is to say that
>The majority of gamers don't play more than a handful of games in a year. There's just no time. You find a game you're into, your pour most of your hours into that game.
is wrong. You asked for proof against that and I gave you a link for gaming trends. You countered with "That's not a good thing", and I don't care. Because that's not my argument. Whever you inferred that I applied personal judgement to these statistics is wrong until you made your comment about that judgement.
So there you have it. If you want to shift your argument to "this isn't good for the consumer"... well, I gave you my take. Take it or leave it, I have nothing more to add to that discussion. If you want to go back to talking about what and how people consume games, feel free to respond to that.
Yes, people do play multiple games a month, so they are also fine renting games to consume more. Even in console games, there are so many accounts to how Gamepass has reinvigorated some people to playing more games than before.
Because tomorrow, they'll take away the option to buy the game. Everyone in the games industry is excited about streaming specifically because making everyone rent their games is long-term more lucrative.
We've done this dance with streaming video in the past. First renting was cheaper and easier. Then renting was the only option, and it stopped being cheaper or easier.
>Then renting was the only option, and it stopped being cheaper or easier.
1. you can still buy the blu-ray for any given recent movie. For non-movies, the alternative was cable, which you did not own. And hoping that they'd release a collection on DVD/BD
2. Despite all the price hikes, streaming is still more bang for your buck unless you only watch 1-2 movies a month. And still much more convinent. We;re not at this point in time in video, so i'm not worried about games in the next 20 years hitting that.
It described life in an unnamed city in which the narrator does not own a car, a house, any appliances, or any clothes, and instead relies on shared services for all of his daily needs.
seems a bit hyperbolic to compare not owning the software on a disc to not owning clothes. Fact is that deluxe entertainment isn't some crucial necessity for most people. So of course they don't mind the lack of ownership.
> seems a bit hyperbolic to compare not owning the software on a disc to not owning clothes.
True. Although, satire does tend to exaggerate to make its point. (I'm assuming the indicated source is at least in part satire, not having yet read it.)
Related to rent vs own: public libraries are (in a sense) renting, just paid for either indirectly or by other people.
> Fact is that deluxe entertainment isn't some crucial necessity for most people. So of course they don't mind the lack of ownership.
Until they try to play something from the past, and can't, because it relied on a game server, streaming server, or some other kind of remote asset that was not preserved. This portends a greater loss of shared culture compared to that which can be backed up or archived. Some people might be working on that, but I expect most will be made preservable only by rare rights-holders or illicit propagation.
> I get that for enthusiasts owning a physical game may be more desirable
It is more desirable. So is not having to be connected to the internet to play your games. So is not paying for something that can be taken from you at any time for any reason without reimbursement. So is having a copy of your game that can't be edited or censored at any time (including silently) and which can always be played in its original form.
Also desirable is the ability to modify or patch the games you paid for however you like, even in ways publishers wouldn't approve of. So is the ability to let a friend borrow the game. So is the ability to resell your games. So is the ability to pass them down to your kids or grand kids.
When all you have is "gaming as a service" you'll be giving up a hell of a lot more than a disk or a box on your shelf. Companies love cloud/subscription based gaming because it gives them far more control, gives them new ways to collect data on users and new ways to push ads at them, and it allows them to force gamers to pay for their games over and over again instead of it being just a one time purchase.
I don't care how "casual" a gamer someone is, they will never be better off giving up so much in exchange for so little, especially since what little they do get is all subject to change at any time, just like the ongoing costs will be.
I certainly like all those features, but would rather have them in a digital form.
I want to download the media to my hard drive, store it on my NAS, back it up in any way, and be able to install it from those sources whenever I want.
I also want licenses to be maintained outside of walled gardens using digital signatures, which I can also maintain my own copy of. As long as I present my license file along with signed game media, I want my console or PC to be able to run that game.
I should also be able to lend, sell, and trade the digital license to anyone along with a copy of the media.
I don't mind digital if it's done right. I like GOG because you don't need their client, you can just download all the installers and manuals directly.
>I don't care how "casual" a gamer someone is, they will never be better off giving up so much in exchange for so little,
maybe you should care more, then. Because you clearly haven't considered the POV of the casual gamer. They want to see a game, download it, tinker for a few hours, and move on. They don't care about data or ads and they sure won't stick around long for subscriptions.
You can't understand an audience if you dismiss them like that.
Thank you for this comment. I relate to every one of your points.
Especially the silent/forced updates. It can be SO bad in games. since the OP is about blizzard- look at hearthstone. Its a card game where you can’t trade, and the cards you sank money into can just get nerfed when the next expansion comes out. It amazes me this is acceptable to some.
years and years ago I played hearthstone but after a couple seasons of "surprise your decks don't work anymore" I realized this was just an endless grind to get me to buy more packs and never logged in again.
Actually you could take that $60 game and sell it for another. And if you didn't buy an absolute stinker you could often get a pretty good amount of cash/credit back if you traded it shortly after release. We also used to have these places where for about $6 you could rent a game for a few days and decide if you want it to own. They often stocked a lot of the hot new release and they didn't need to enter special deals with the publisher for it to be available. If we had better rights over the stuff we buy digutally we could have stuff like this again.
It’s like the twilight zone in this thread. You argued that buying physical games is throwing away money. Then proceeded to say subscription services are actually better. Kinda absurd, if I don’t like any games on game pass then that’s money down the drain. No refund. If I buy physical games, I can & do sell them for half or even double what I bought it for. Games are an asset. Humanity is doomed if people really down want feeding trough entertainment, not caring what they play/watch and paying monthly for the experience
What are you talking about?? Owning a physical game is not at ALL what we are discussing. I buy 2-4 games a month, all through steam and OBVIOUSLY they are all digital downloads, no physical copies.
Going from an ownership model to a rent-extracting subscription model is a HORRIBLE idea that almost no one wants (just execs who see $$$ and few gamers living in cities with low-latency high bandwidth internet)
I love Xbox game pass streaming, for many of the reasons I like streaming music, tv, and movies. It’s cheap to try things- I can fire up a new game without waiting to download 40+ GB. If the play engages me I’ll keep playing, if not I’ll move on.
I’m not a very good with high speed games anyways, so the increased latency isn’t generally noticeable in the games I play.
The issue isn’t about trying out games, it’s about having access to those games in 5, 10, 20 years or later. There is a growing list of digital only titles that are no longer available to new players and may be unavailable to people who “bought” them. I have a bricked Wii with digital games that are tied to the physical console, not any account. There is no way to recover them.
Steam has done a remarkable job staying open for 20 years (My copy of Half Life 2 is right where I left it). Sony has done a reasonable job. I don’t know about Microsoft. Nintendo has failed several times, but may have finally figured it out with the Switch.
I know I can buy discs and cartridges from any previous era and as long as I have a system (or emulator), I can play them, lend them, or sell them. Digital versions allow me to play, but for how long. I can’t lend or sell them. If I get the urge to play Resogun in 2033 and don’t have it downloaded, am I going to be able to?
I do think there may be a generational component to it as well. I’ve always thought Gen X is more tied to the idea of “owning” a copy (music, movies, games), while younger generations are more comfortable with digital only releases, or even subscription catalogues that change over time as the primary means of entertainment.
Microsoft has done a decent job. Digital purchases made on 360 that are compatible with Xbox One/Series consoles have transferred over and you often get the PC and Xbox version of a title for buying a game in the Windows Store (and get the PC version if it is available in the Windows Store if you buy on Xbox).
The majority of new games can't work offline, and having a physical disc is now so rare that companies are selling game boxes and deluxe editions that contain no software at all - not even a download code, since you need to buy it with an account anyway.
Generally the disk in the box has to have something on it that runs (It may not even be the game). This is due to the lead time involved in pressing and validating the gold master that becomes the game disk. This allows the developers to continue working on their launch day ‘patch’.
With the development cycle and Sony and Microsoft’s distribution setup as it is now, physical copies effectively act as a token to play the game only. Using Cyberpunk 2077 as an example a recent patch to the game mandated a nearly full redownload of the whole game on PS5 and Xbox Series - ~60+GB. On PC it was ~5G.
A lot of collector's editions aren't including the game anymore. It's just knickknacks. Statue, stickers, steel book to put the disc if you bought that version. That kind of thing.
The standard physical editions still include a disc or cartridge and occasionally just a code.
In theory I'm interested. In reality, 99% of games I care about will be remastered/ported or even remade 20 years later. $60 in the grand scheme of 20 years isn't even an afterthought.
I'm fine enough with piracy being the nuclear option if we run into situations like with F-Zero or Legends of Dragoon or whatnot. But there are official options for almost every other game I would be interested in re-visiting. I still like owning a disc the same way I like owning a physical book, but I'd be lying if I said I ever popped in a disc for any 10+ year old game. It's more of a sentimental gesture to display on my shelf than a means of preservation.
Game streaming is a great option to have but it incentivises the same behaviour we've seen from companies that move to a SAAS model: Charge a monthly fee and remove the option to own the product.
Not actually owning the games is a problem. Nvidia's service, GeForce Now, originally allowed you to play any game you had purchased on Steam, under the theory that you were using your license to play it. Their library was decimated when that was challenged legally.
Most of the services don't offer the same modding options as you would have on PC either.
If I were to pick between the two, I'd rather we move towards having more control over the things we purchase than less.
too bad the choice isnt ours and we've long seen how other audiences in other media have chosen. People simply don't care about those things as a majority
I hesitate to blame the audience when vendors are all too keen to force the transition themselves. See Adobe, Microsoft, and Atlassian's discontinuing/restriction of on premises licenses for their products.
People often seem to have a general sense of helplessness when it comes to large businesses, why get upset about it when there's nothing you can do?
I don't see anything unless people find the motivation to make it a political issue.
A personal anecdote that I think exemplifies the problem:
I was once double invoiced for custom charges by FedEx. The phone number on the invoice lead to a phone tree where every option simply hung up. Depending on where I looked there were three different email addresses, and an online form; only one provided an automated response and my first three emails were ignored entirely. Their customer support line was unable to connect to that department.
At one point I was given an individual's work email and received no response either. Despite this, I continued to receive past due, and final notice letters from them.
It took months and hours of my time to resolve a problem they created, had I not persisted, I would have had to deal with collections and credit agencies.
Why should we allow companies behave this way without repercussions?
I'd rather we were transitioning towards consumers actually owning their games rather than towards them not being able to run them on their own hardware.
We've already seen how this plays out with the proliferation of SAAS and the move to subscription models that leave consumers with nothing if the company goes bust or they stop paying.
Companies that grow beyond a certain size are harmful to the economy. The harm to consumers isn't always direct or obvious but it reduces choice and creates a situation where the company wields outsized power over consumers and the state.
I mostly like Microsoft but they should be a much smaller and more focused company.
Honestly... IMO that analysis is completely misguided and nearly contradictory.
Even if I accept the premise that the merger will (1) increase cloud and game streaming and (2) cloud/streaming games is good for consumers, I would argue it "harms consumers" under the legal anti-competitive and anti-trust arguments.
My argument is that achieving premise (1) via a merger is by-definition anti-consumer because it would strengthen cloud/game streaming outside of actual consumer demand. It's not possible or the place for the courts to decide what consumers "want" beyond high level details like cost, and availability, etc.
There's no rule preventing Activison from licensing it's games to Microsoft's, Sony's, etc. cloud gaming services. If there was genuine consumer demand for cloud gaming, then Activison is in the perfect position to get the best deal from all/any of the existing cloud gaming providers.
> (Article) Subscriptions and streaming have turned the music and television industries upside down in the past couple of decades.
Music, TV, and Film streaming all grew out of independent providers. Really it started with rentals which used the "first-sale" doctrine to even exist - it doesn't get much more independent than buying the standalone product and renting it. The fact that TV/Movie streaming is now fragmenting is causing large amounts of pain and cost for consumers not less. Over the past decade only Music streaming has remained simple and cheap - and all of the major providers here are independent of the record companies.
I don't believe that streaming games is in the interest of consumers in the slightest.
That said, I don't have a problem with the merger. It won't help consumers and it won't help people working for the studios. That was not the case in any merger in the past.
While they have a lot of solid IPs that will generate billions for years to come, I believe these studios have a hard time to innovate. The likelihood that at some point someone will eat their lunch is pretty high. Gaming IPs have a lot of momentum, but there are always new challengers around the corner.
Uh that rule was based on a 75 year long 'temporary' agreement that has expired. That is another part of this whole Writers and Actors striking that the media isn't talking about. I think the agreement was to settle a case before the Supreme Court in 1948, it just ended and it is now Game On for the studios to take over the theaters again.
I work in gaming at Microsoft and I really enjoy it. I think Microsoft gives us a ton of space to explore and make our own impact and I am a huge fan* of Phil Spencer.
> Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision has been described as the largest in tech history. It deserves scrutiny. That scrutiny has paid off: Microsoft has committed in writing, in public, and in court to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation for 10 years on parity with Xbox.
How does this make anyone feel any better? What happens after 10 years? Microsoft has been around for 4x that long.
> How does this make anyone feel any better? What happens after 10 years?
What happens in less than 10 years if they don't abide by it?
Does Activision get split back out? I doubt it.
We're long past the point where you can just set rules/laws and companies will abide by it. We need to be at the point where we also list the punishment ahead of time.
You mean like Facebook/WhatsApp which committed to not do some things and that certain things aren't even technically possible (which even back then was a lie) to get the merger through in the EU and then a few years later was, oh that, yep, let's ignore it and just turn it into a long legal battle which will anyway cost us far less then what we gain from it.
Depends how good Sony's lawyers are. Theoretically the courts could offer an injunction preventing sale of the CoD until it is also available on whatever equivalent Playstation type system there is.
Sony vs MS lawyers... that would be messy... and fun to watch. grabs popocorn
Would they just build a COD that is dependent on specific MS tech so they cannot release it on competing systems? Why not try and rebrand Call of Duty so that it isn't in violation? Just call it 'Duty'. It starts to get very grey very quickly.
> What happens in less than 10 years if they don't abide by it?
Likely nothing. I don't understand why people believe in these things.
> We're long past the point where you can just set rules/laws and companies will abide by it.
What's the rule / law here anyhow? There are always workarounds, e.g. it says it will keep it in parity with xbox... well what if they called a new console something else?
> Likely nothing. I don't understand why people believe in these things.
No kidding. They could just introduce a new game franchise called "Duty of Call - Warfare That's Modern" and make that Xbox exclusive instead. Or any number of other workarounds and sneaky tactics.
that's not a bad idea, laws without punishments are kind of ambiguous I suppose. I wonder the utility of leaving this open, is it tantamount to mandatory sentencing and takes freedom away from the judge or something like that.
> We're long past the point where you can just set rules/laws and companies will abide by it.
We're not, but this is pretty nebulous stuff. The state blocking freely agreed transactions because it can foresee some damage is not exactly a clear cut good, other than for people who are reassured by the idea of the state as a benevolent, all-knowing mom and pop, and for the lawyers who get paid a fortune to debate past and future hypotheticals.
What about this: allow the merger, and if the harm is done, the company must pay, but if the harm is not done, the state must pay?
> What about this: allow the merger, and if the harm is done, the company must pay, but if the harm is not done, the state must pay?
The FTC identified not having CoD on multiple platforms as a large issue. What payment is justified if Microsoft doesn't allow CoD on multiple platforms?
It's easy to say "if harm is done, the company must pay" but look how long we've know leaded gasoline was harmful, look how long we've know abestoes was harmful, look how long we've know pfas was harmful, look how long we've know cigarettes are harmful. And then look how long it took for any company to pay after fighting tooth and nail saying it wasn't harmful despite their _own_ internal research saying the contrary.
Sure, CoD is not in the same scope as leaded gasoline. The point still remains, a harm has been identified and I don't think they should be allowed to merge so long as the punishment for that harm occurring isn't pre-determined.
> Companies with more resources than small countries are often too big to regulate because they capture the regulators and/or the judiciary.
Regulatory capture is entirely the fault of the regulator. They don't have to be captured. They choose to be. A government body, funded by taxes, that decides to be captured, is a complete disgrace. People work hard to pay taxes, and they shouldn't be spent on employing people who choose to align with those they should be regulating.
> Prevention is cheaper than treatment, especially when treatments have proven so ineffective.
The same state that has the power to prevent has the power to treat. It chooses not to. Switching approach won't help. Getting regulators to do their jobs will.
I wish it were that simple. Sadly a large portion of US voters seem to think a revolving door with "industry experts" (i.e. insiders) is desirable. And that courts should defer to business interests above all else.
‘Running the government like a business’ is and was the biggest crock of shit ever sold.
Anyone who has worked at large corporate bureaucracies knows they are just as slow and rule bound as government departments and in many ways worse. At least there are some well motivated people in government.
Government is us. The people. We’ve delegated it to an elite class that gets more and more cut off from the common politik as time goes by.
I see no easy solution . Power does not willingly give up power.
I don't think any solution here we've mentioned is simple. I don't think you should be characterising only the ones I'm mentioning as being not simple.
The state blocking freely agreed transactions because it would allow someone to create something larger and more coercive than the state seems like a good minimum.
We don't have to debate past and future hypotheticals - that's an invention of the "consumer welfare" theory of antitrust. The one that said it's entirely fine for, say, Apple to have a monopoly on iOS software as long as they have a prosocial justification for it. Apple's specific argument is that their monopoly protects from malware... or, in other words, they're big enough that they can make and enforce their own laws.
A better and simpler rule is this: being big is illegal, period. That's how antitrust used to work. If a business deal would give you the capability of becoming your own sovereign state, you don't get to execute that deal. If you knock out all your competition, we break you up into competing companies.
This is the sort of thing that triggers free market types, I know. My argument is specifically that large businesses get to write their own rules, and the only way to prevent them from doing that is to make them small enough that they cannot execute political power equivalent to that of a monarch. Right now, we live in this comedic parody of free market liberalism where the business owners have centralized power to themselves, turning themselves into de-facto states, and gotten the de-jure state drunk on surveillance tech to avoid scrutiny.
Why would you be a huge fan of the man who’s single handedly responsible for sinking the Xbox IP ship to the point of having to monopolize the industry to right the ship?
I’m surprised people didn’t wake up with the One era lies he kept pushing, and given HNs general distaste for “marketer talk”, how can one be a fan of a dude that every time he opens his mouth, it’s marketing talk (when it’s not a lie). This dude would constantly say shit like “the console wars are stupid. We need to all get along”. And then when pressed about “hidden DGPU” that he knew didn’t exist, he lies and responds “we are not letting Sony have a hardware advantage”. This dude is a scumbag.
He’s been terrible for Xbox, and now his horrid management of Xbox has led to being terrible for gaming in general.
I am most definitely not, Mattick was Mr “we have a console for that, the Xbox 360” ultimately leading to Spencer taking his role over. Spencer was 100% the dude saying “we’re not letting Sony have a hardware advantage” although I may have mixed up which obviously bullshit Xbox fanboy excuse it was about.
None of it really matter though, because even forgetting Phil obviously constantly fanning the console wars, he’s presided over Xbox for what like 10 years? In that time, what he’s managed to do is be a baby, and complain that his ineffective management is leading to their console having no games.
Yeah. Looking at past form, after the MS anti-trust agreement in the EU expired (the browser choice one), MS have now gone all-in to force Edge down everyone's throat.
They're clearly "Ok, we have more room to legally get away with XYZ now so LETS GO FOR IT!!!!".
The judge considers it reasonable because if the market is as the FTC defines it and if Call of Duty is actually an essential input for a competitor in the "high-performance gaming console" space, then those commitments from Microsoft give Sony ten years to innovate and come up with a replacement for CoD. It makes a lot more sense if you read the whole judgement, Judge Corley is basically saying "Most of what the FTC is asserting is questionable, but even if we assume that their assertions are correct, the argument to temporarily prevent & potentially permanently ban the deal to prevent harm there is little evidence for is not strong enough to harm Microsoft and Activision in this way". There's other stuff that had some impact as well, like how the FTC knew the deals deadline (six days from now) more than a year ago, but only chose to bring the PI motion recently, giving Microsoft barely any time to prepare (and making the federal judge in this case have to work some unusual hours, including the entire weekend, because it's now so time critical). Basically, a lot more went into this decision than just the ten year agreements.
in 10 years I fully expect Sony to have a competitive first party title exclusive to playstation, now that they actually have to give a damn. I love the killzone series but Guerilla seems to be doing fine with Horizon, hopefully a new IP
In 10 years Sony… I don’t think Sony is intending to go all out on gaming going forward. They’ve been figuring out how to cross pollinate their IPs into media productions. It certainly will make them more money in the long term but some people might be turned off with how much they milk each franchise before moving onto a new IP. Naughty dog is working on LoU3 and Guerilla is working on Horizon Remaster, Horizon Multiplayer and supposedly a non horizon game..
A bit of a loaded question, but how do you feel about xbox f-in up major titles like Halo Infinite and Phil Spencer just saying "yep, we are sorry, that's on me". When a) there doesn't seem to be any change in quality assurance (see Redfall) and b) the devs still take the hit (see 343).
To me it's incomprehensible how they managed to f-up Halo Infinite, then just stand there in silence and then say, yeah we are sorry for not having a lot of interesting titles on Xbox, but here's what's coming next year.
If I were a game dev at Microsoft, I'd be furious!
It would be incredibly stupid for MS to make CoD an xbox exclusive and completely misses the business case for buying Activision in the first place.
Remember, MS is in business to make money, not to win the console wars. Buying the CoD (etc) IP at an inflated price and then immediately cutting off more than half of the revenue would be so mind-boggingly stupid, almost to the point of malpractice. This is why they really don't even need to be forced into saying they'll maintain it for 10 years on PS.
It's all about moving gaming to a recurring revenue model. So you don't care about if the consumer made a one time purchase of your console (in fact, you might even prefer they didn't if you're losing money on each one!), but you do care about the fact that they're playing your games.
Ben Thompson put it better than I could:
> Notice that this is for games that are purchased, and keep in mind that Microsoft’s goal with the Activision acquisition is not to gain exclusive games to sell but rather games to subscribe to. As I’ve argued the only way this acquisition makes sense is the extent to which it makes possible a new business model for gaming; simply buying exclusives via established titles like Call of Duty would be hugely value destructive.
>What is notable about Microsoft’s subscription push is that it aligns the company’s Xbox division with Microsoft’s overall push towards cloud computing and subscription services. What is interesting to consider are two questions:
>First, would Microsoft have ever gone down this path absent the investment in its original (failed) Xbox strategy? I would argue the answer is no; this is a reasonable leveraging of Xbox assets, but I do wonder if Microsoft could go back two decades if they would even bother.
>Second, if regulators were to kill this deal (Microsoft still needs approval from the UK and the US) would Xbox be long for this world? It’s hard to see how the division makes sense if Microsoft has the current business model dictated to them, given just how dominant Sony is with said business model.
The following is personal opinion based on publicly available figures, IDK how accurate they are.
Skyrim has supposedly sold around 60 million copies over the span of 12 years. Let's be generous and say those sold at an average of $60 each (probably less in practice due to sales, etc.)
That's $3.6b USD in raw revenue. Pretty sick!
On the other hand, as of 2022 (Skyrim numbers are 2023), Call of Duty as a franchise had generated over $31b USD in raw revenue. 10x that of Skyrim, Bethesda's biggest title.
So in terms of scale, I don't see how making Starfield exclusive can possibly be on the same level as the idea of making the whole CoD franchise exclusive. Certainly it would be impactful but I can understand treating them differently.
My disagreement would be that you're comparing an installment with a franchise. The whole of the Elder Scrolls is bigger than Skyrim, although Skyrim was the biggest standalone seller. Elder Scrolls online has I think about 750k MAUs, at $10-$15/mo.
And, I suppose more fundamentally, why would MS turn down a good chunk of $3.6b for the dev costs of making a Playstation version of Starfield?
>My disagreement would be that you're comparing an installment with a franchise.
funny thing is that if you compared the last 15 years of COD to Elder scrolls, you're still comparing some dozen COD games to Skyrim and ESO. And I guess that one mobile game? 15 years ago is still a year after Oblivion launched.
You don't just cut it off in a single go, Microsoft make their platforms more enticing. Heck they can do game companies used to and have timed exclusive releases. COD dropping on Xbox 2 months before anyone else.
Microsoft are REALLY good at playing the long game.
If MS doesn't care about winning the console wars why don't they just stop making Xboxes entirely?
Microsoft's subscription push can't work without winning the console wars since Sony isn't about to let them put GamePass on PS since that kills Sony's revenue model. (That would itself be a very interesting antitrust case.)
So they still want to win the console wars, they just want to monetize that victory differently. But pulling things like Starfield - and eventually COD - off of other platforms is 10000% still aligned with "making as much money as possible."
Because they want to sell their games without paying a 30% cut to someone (Sony/Nintendo/Valve/Apple/Google/etc) if possible. Also getting the 30% cut from someone else selling on their platform is really nice.
The economics are different: Redfall isn't a huge name, so it's more valuable for MS to get people into the game pass subscription than the comparatively piddly incremental one-time revenue they'd get from releasing it on PS5.
CoD on the other hand is already a huge name, that releases every year (i.e. recurring revenue, even if it's not a subscription per se), and MS is paying a huge premium for it. Forcing people over to game pass in that case isn't worth taking the hit to reliable revenue you're virtually already guaranteed to get from PS owners.
To be clear: I think it's less important to worry about this as less of a PC/Xbox exclusive than a Game Pass exclusive/available. I'd be willing to bet if Sony approached MS to bring Game Pass to PS, MS would be super willing to do it. Not that Sony would given their business model, but that's basically the point. It's not HW platform exclusivity, but store/subscription exclusivity.
Microsoft themselves said that they had no economic incentive to make Starfield exclusive prior to buying Bethesda then went and did it anyways. They have earned a huge amount of skepticism in any of these matters and are absolutely not trustworthy.
There's so much speculation about motives here. Neither you nor I have any idea what Microsoft's business strategy is. All I can judge them on is their actions. And their actions are buying up large publishers and making their most anticipated games exclusive to the Xbox. Sure Redfall was a somewhat minor release (and a mess), but what about Starfield? The game is hyped up to hell and now an Xbox exclusive as well.
Minecraft proves the parent's point. Following your logic, Microsoft should've made Minecraft an exclusive. They didn't. In fact they're expanding the footprint, rolling it out to Chromebooks last month.
Well, the FTC court docs show Phil Spencer wanted to (the spinoff Minecraft Dungeons), but couldn't due to the contract with Notch. He instructed his team to try and find a loophole, and described the contract as something he regrets. When asked about this on the stand, he said "We ended up releasing on PlayStation"
With the enormous size difference in Playstation to XBox markets, it is not a "piddly incremental" to also tap that market. Odds are stacked heavily against them making more by aiming for the subscription uptick they may see. That is, this is almost certainly a "grow the market" move. Hard to see it as anything else.
I don't know. I doubt MS, Sony, or the FTC know either. They probably have an idea, but who's to say if it right or wrong? It's really hard to predict markets out that far.
Why can't MS play along with the industry and support Vulkan on Xbox though? That would make them not look like the worst lock-in examples of the '90s.
Feels like these kind of issues are what anti-trust should have handled.
A large chunk of the entire purpose of Xbox is to cement DirectX as the default option to perpetuate that lock-in. It's even in the name: The Direct X-Box!
I don't think they really care what people think until it becomes a really major issue. MS has been through this these fazes so many times in the past and look at were they are. It doesn't seem to have slowed them down that much.
That lock in of the 90's never really stopped, they just figure out how to make it look better. The only times they gave up on the lock in was when it was starting to look really bad and even then they just pivot the messaging and then try to lock themselves in. Look at MS with "We love Linux", it didn't slow Windows down one bit.
It's a damn shame too, since they could really take advantage of things like dxvk (zlib licenced) to make porting existing games easier. Surprised no 'middleware' company has tried this either.
Optimistically, Sony utilizes their Bungie aquisition and makes something worthy as a competitor. I imagine the 10 years is less a promise and more of a timer, and 10 years is enough for a AAA company to get at least a few attempts.
Pessimistically, MS drives Activision to the ground and COD isn't even a valuable IP anymore. Bigger icons have fallen from grace faster.
> Ehm, allow me to remind everyone what I heard about Twitter censorship for years.. If Sony doesn’t like it, they can make their own Call of Duty.
Maybe Microsoft should argue this point instead. But they didn't. They argued that they would allow CoD on multi-platforms so it's only reasonable to expect people to respond to that point.
It's a bit similar to how some people said that the posts deserved to be deleted while others said those people should just make their own twitter. Depending on whose talking and their argument you need to change your response. Using a response that the posts shouldn't've have been deleted to somebody who said you should make your own twitter is a non-sequitor.
>Maybe Microsoft should argue this point instead. But they didn't. They argued that they would allow CoD on multi-platforms so it's only reasonable to expect people to respond to that point.
That's just basic business. If I buy a shoe factory, I'm going to say of course I'll sell them to Canadians! I wouldn't say "Eh, stuff it Canada, go make your own shoes!" even if my own internal plans didn't prioritize exports.
But there's nothing dishonest with Canada trying to block the purchase on the shoe factory on the grounds that they don't believe you'll actually sell to them considering they legitimately don't believe you.
Perhaps you may feel that Canadians can be responsible for making their own shoe companies that sell to Canada. Then bring up that as your argument instead of having "oh yeah, I'll totally sell to you" as your argument.
Well, your comment is flagged so I can no longer quote from it.
But from what I remember is that you were accusing people of being dishonest because they said that Twitter could have an alternative but people aren't saying that Sony can just make a CoD alternative.
And I'm saying its not dishonest because A) its different people and B) Microsoft made a claim and these response are directly in response to that claim.
It’s not about Sony, but customers that own a PS and not an XBox. Microsoft loves to buy studios and restrict access, just look a Halo it was introduced as a Mac game by the studio, Microsoft bought them specifically for XBox and fuck anyone that owned a Mac.
2 years after release they released a copy of the first game because all the work was done. Nothing from the rest of the series.
Please, Apple has been shooting themselves in the foot with gaming for decades. Halo: CE was also released for the Mac, so I'm not sure what the complaint is here.
What are you blaming Apple for Microsoft’s direct customer harm here?
A more than 2 year delay for the first game and never getting the rest of the series is a major downside for existing customers. That’s exactly the kind of monopolist behavior you are supposed to block mergers for. Waiting 2 years cost Microsoft a little revenue directly, but pushed XBox sales which was far more valuable.
Halo would have been a flop if it was Mac exclusive.
Keep in mind, this was back in the year ~2000. Mac market share in the home user market was a rounding error. Schools were full of iMacs, but at home, it was all Windows.
The entire point was Halo wouldn’t have been an anything exclusive. Bungee would have released it on all platforms at roughly the same timeframe.
“Due out in the first half of 2000, Halo will have a simultaneous release for PC and Mac, with multiplayer compatibility between the two operating systems. While you'll need a 3D card and a powerful system to take full advantage of the game's features, it'll be scalable so you can play it on less powerful machines.” http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9907/26/halo.idg/
Things got delayed ~18 months so Microsoft could port it to XBox thus waiting till November 2001. Then tacked on another 2 years to release it on Mac.
Yes, in 2003 not 2000 which is when they would have gotten it without Microsoft fucking them over.
First Halo was delayed to port it to windows and XBox on top of that two years after its initial release they let the already working Mac version out the door. That’s a huge fuck you by any standard.
On top of this Halo 2 etc was XBox and Windows exclusive fuck PS owners, fuck Mac owners, and fuck the free market.
Given how Microsoft has managed Bethesda (giving them a large amount of autonomy and shipping the doomed Redfall) it's way too optimistic to expect any positive changes for Activision/Blizzard customers. It wouldn't surprise me is Bobby kept running the whole thing, just under Microsoft's ownership.
Meanwhile I do expect more Xbox exclusives - which will ultimately harm consumers.
Microsoft’s acquisition of Bethesda lead directly to Starfield not being released on the Sony PlayStation at all. I read the game’s developers were not happy with that.
I think Microsoft might be treating it as kind of a loss leader. But from an article I read the employees and executives whose bonuses are based on sales are mad about PS5 being cut out of the equation. And I can see what you site about Game Pass playing into that as well.
All I know about that is I tried to migrate my Mojang account to Microsoft - when Microsoft started "unifying logins" - and I still haven't heard back from them. So my experience has been negative. Hopefully they don't try to migrate Battle.net accounts in the future.
FYI you have 2 months to migrate your account before they delete it. You will have to repurchase the game on a new account if you ever want to play it again if you don't migrate it by September 19th.
> MLex also reported last month that Microsoft was exploring options to close the deal despite the UK block, which could have involved closing over the UK decision and potentially carving out Activision in the UK. That’s a messy process, and it looks like both parties are now willing to negotiate to avoid it.
An independent studio is independent. Just because other countries can be better run by 1 country, doesn't justify acquiring other companies. Many corporations once they acquire a smaller company, skin it for parts, and dissolve it. Like HBO-Discovery recently. The consumer almost always pays, either in terms of choice, or price.
Sony is at little risk of harm here. They have a ridiculous amount of system selling platform exclusives. Microsoft has what Halo, Forza, Gears of War, and I guess Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020? They have a few other exclusives, but I don't think they're enough to make someone chose an Xbox over a PlayStation.
Microsoft is seriously behind this generation and I just don't see them continuing next generation if they can't make up some ground this one.
These are genre-defining games, and have been historically multiplatform. Not just Activision, they did the Bethesda acquisition, before it. Now, Elder Scrolls, Fallout, will be only Xbox. And now Starfield is confirmed exclusively on Xbox. These are the games I buy a system for, and I only have a PS4 before.
Europe considers both direct harm to consumers and harm to competitors because without significant competition, the big players inevitably slide into exploiting customers and their vendors.
The current status quo is on a path to being harmful to both.
I love Nintendo but they compete more with Apple and Google than they do with Sony and Microsoft.
If Microsoft exits game consoles next generation Sony won’t have any real competition and that will be very bad for consumers.
Microsoft needs their own heavy hitting exclusives and they need them sooner than they can home grow them. This acquisition is one of the only ways they can do that.
There really isn't a Nintendo-Sony duopoly. They don't really compete with each other. It's a handheld game system with the ability to dock and work with a TV. The hardware and its gaming capabilities are very different. There is almost no overlap in the games available to each console. Nintendo stopped competing on high performance hardware several generations ago.
It competes like a Honda Civic competes with a Chevrolet Corvette.
Out of curiosity, which year Type R did that lap? I'm familliar with the EK9 generation from the 90s, is this lap in one of the newer models from the last years?
And the 2023 was a stripped down version only available in Europe as well, that + the track change is why I looked up the 2017 numbers to compare properly.
Ha, I missed that. “Type R S” sold in left hand drive European markets to let them call it a production car lap time, as if anyone actually wants a Civic with no air conditioning.
I don't really buy this. There's only so many much time individuals can/will commit to playing video games and spend on accessories. There'll be an overlap of those who can afford the time/money to use both a Switch and a PS5. And with consoles, it's often game sales that matter more than hardware as Nintendo is the only company that makes some money off of its hardware.
Quality of games doesn't matter so much. If someone is spending hours playing Tears of the Kingdom, that's time not spent on playing games on another console.
Even with your analogy there will be some people who can afford 2 cars and drive them for different occasions but others only dedicate to just one. And even then a person can only drive one car at a time.
This is weird. The judge says that because there won’t be any anticompetitive effects in the next 10 years (because MS made a pinky promise), this merger is fine?
What about after those 10 years? What about anything not Call of Duty?
10 years is also nothing in game development. Games now can take up to 7 years from conception to release, and then there is post release content. Based on the “10 years”, that would mean like what, 1 game out of each series would be cross platform? And for Sony, they would need to start developing a competent competitor to Call of Duty immediately. Or Sony could just buy EA and create a Titanfall 3 since I guess it’s okay for big ass companies to buy one another now.
There has been a major Call of Duty release 19 of the last 20 years, they only missed 2004 between the original in 2003 and 2 in 2005. 10 year commitment means 10 CoD games for Sony.
I get your point for the industry at large. For example, Skyrim 2011. ES6, 2026? Maybe? But CoD, I swear, you sneeze and there's a new title. CoD: Modern Warfare 2: Black Ops: 2023 reboot. For the record, I'm mostly being tongue in cheek here, but the franchise does seem to release unusually frequently.
This is why market capitalisation is not always the best of metrics.
AT&T assets are valued at almost twice of T-Mobile (~$400B vs ~$211B). AT&T is also ahead of Verizon (~$377B) by a nice margin. It’s also right behind Verizon in revenue, and ahead of T-Mobile ($136B for Verizon, $120B for AT&T, and $80B for T-Mobile).
> since I guess it’s okay for big ass companies to buy one another now.
Thats not really the case, no. Sony is the monopoly market leader in the console space right now.
It would be more likely to be illegal for Sony to do this, and it is not illegal for microsoft to do the same, because Microsoft is not the monopoly market leader in the console space.
Im hoping Microsoft will altruistically stop producing these addictive “games”.
As a new console player, the differences between a game like Halo Infinite and Overwatch (FPS 4v4/5v5) are enough to put me from playing and in control to binging.
Here’s a tangent:
The most popular sports leagues in the world are mimicked by people all over the world who play casual and team sports. The game itself is not proprietary.
Why can’t we make popular open source video games? If games were not owned by a single entity, anyone could host tournaments and leagues, more similar to baseball, basketball, and football. We could all play the same game.
> Why can’t we make popular open source video games?
Well, there are some. Check out Bitburner, Battle for Wesnoth, 0 A.D, etc.
The serious answer is that it's very hard work that requires a multi-year development cycle and a diverse variety of talent (design, art, etc) in addition to software engineering.
In addition, a lot of the tools and game engines used to create AAA titles are very expensive (and closed-source).
If you've got a team working on a game in just their spare time, it's going to be very dated by the time it actually launches.
While some decent examples have been provided in another response, it is kind of telling when most Libre/open multiplayer FPS titles are still built on Quake 3 engine. And they are not exactly to most vibrant communities. But it will run on almost anything form the last 20 years I guess.
I think a part of it is that the video game industry is good at absorbing a lot of people with talent. Game folks are at the intersection of arts and technology but it also isn't firmly in either camp, so people can be poached away fairly easily from open projects if they have a lot of talent.
>Why can’t we make popular open source video games
Nothing is stopping anyone and there are a few. Nothing as big as COD but they exist. But I imagine the result will be similar to how traditional sports work. There will be one big definitive organization for a sport (let's say COD or this example), a few large minor leagues (some knockoff CODs that are fun but nowhere near as popular), and then some small pickup games in a field (the indie games some single dev makes that no one will find).
As a complete tangent, the Touhou series is famously loose in its license and many fans and companies alike have utilized the IP to make games and every other kind of media.
This shows a sad ignorance to how little leagues and the like actually work. The games may not be proprietary in the computer sense, but they are very much beholden to the major players for more than makes sense.
That’s a silly analogy. All you need to play soccer is a ball. A game takes years and tens of thousands of man-hours to make. In your analogy the soccer ball manufacturers are the game companies.
Microsoft don't need to make Call of Duty an exclusive. They only need to put new CoD games on Gamepass and Sony are screwed. It'll make Sony's platform look much more expensive.
I hear what you're saying but also understand that putting games on gamepass costs money to microsoft in lost sales. It's like Disney - if all their movies go directly to disney+ they're training customers to not spend $60-80 on buying new games and instead wait for them to come to the cheaper monthly subscription. That isn't free - they still have to develop the game, and the return on the game is lower.
You can't pretend moving to a monthly recurring revenue model thats still profitable is dumping, at least not honestly.
My point was that just releasing everything day one on xbox live cannot be a long term sustainable strategy as you're only making $15/month or whatever from that user, but it isn't dumping.
I never said it is dumping, I made an analogy to dumping. Dumping is not a long term sustainable strategy either, and yet governments decided to make it illegal (well some forms of dumping at least).
It depends on the engine but indy studios are frequently able to port to all of the major platforms: PC, Xbox, PlayStation, and Switch.
The exclusive addressable market for each is definitely big enough to outweigh porting costs.
A good first step would be to ban exclusivity agreements, rather than mandate cross platform availability and to fine both parties heavily for suspected foul play.
Exclusivity agreements are a great example of something that is directly harmful to consumers. It removes choice, increases cost, encourages electronic waste, and leads to an inferior experience.
It's not illegal to make publishing deals in any way. And Square isn't beholden to anyone in particular. They have made deals with Nintendo and even Microsoft for various games, promotional material, etc.
And that's not even getting into their game-adjacent deals (AMD, various cloud services) and the dozens of crossovers with the stragest companies (remember when Final Fantasy 13 released some Louis Vuitton fashion line?)
Either they will just break the deal and pay the fines (I'm not sure of the exact details of the punishment) or they will just give themselves enough technical advantage to make the competition versions unfavorable.
I mean, we don't question a Tiger when it eats someones face - it is just what a Tiger does. This is just how Microsoft and big business works.
I was thinking the same thing. So much emphasis on Call of Duty. Did a quick search of Activision's most profitable games and Call of Duty is definitely #1 by nearly 3x the next, but there are plenty of other heavy-hitters to make it diversified.
Call of Duty, Diablo, World of Warcraft, StarCraft, and Overwatch are some of the most popular games in the world. They may not be to your liking or mine but this is objectively not true.
The FTC's incredibly low win rate in federal court should be a source of agency-wide embarrassment. The only place they reliably win is their kangaroo "administrative courts" in which they act as the judge, jury and executioner but those are probably on their way out. But it doesn't even matter anyways because the new strategy is going to be outsourcing enforcement to Europe.
I would expect the FTC to have a low win rate. Let's leave aside how atrophied enforcement of antitrust has been over the last 40 years, and the subsequent implications for case law, regulations and human skill of litigators.
This is a 75 billion dollar event between two giant companies. They can pay for legal advice. That legal advice is well incentivized to predict how the case will go, and signed off on it. I assume MS has to pay a hefty fee if the acquisition is blocked for antitrust reasons, in addition to the time and embarrassment for all involved.
Therefore, the only cases the FTC should expect to see are ones where highly paid lawyers said "we will probably win this case". They might be wrong (and the FTC does seem unable to stop too many cases), but no matter how tough the enforcement gets, I would expect the FTC to usually lose at trial. The standards will just be applied pre-merger announcement (or probably pre-offer).
It might be an exciting couple of years when the FTC regrows its backbone and the lawyers assessing mergers have not caught up yet.
The FTC is still spooling anti trust enforcement back up from a nonexistent state. A lot of the rules governing mergers and acquisitions haven't been enforced since the 1980s due to regulatory capture.
Read up on developments in anti-trust in the last couple of years here:
Is the low win rate a surprise though? As a foreign observer, the US justice system seems to largely be based on who can spend the most - so large company > government > small company > citizen is pretty much the assumed outcome. I have a vague sense the order also wraps around (individual > large company) because of cases like the McDonald's boiling coffee, but in those cases headlines and bad PR are just acting as a proxy for money.
This is a great decision for the US game industry. Sony has a ton of exclusives, many from acquisitions, and strengthening XBOX will help maintain a competitive gaming market which should lead to even better exclusives in the long run. Some of the best rivalries in the history of gaming came from different sides with hard hitting exclusives (SNES vs Genesis for instance).
While Microsoft has promised to keep Call of Duty on the Playstation, I think it would be totally ok if they stopped doing that in the future, as any other Activision-Blizzard game; after all, Uncharted and Last of Us aren't available on the XBOX either.
Maybe we can put aside the superficial sports-team rivalries for a moment.
Maybe both Microsoft and Sony could develop good products that consumers and publishers want to pay money for, rather than make unrelated, restrictive business deals!
>rather than make unrelated, restrictive business deals!
I thought you wanted to put aside the superficial sports-team rivalries?
No casual consumer cares about the deals, they care about the games. If this makes better games, cool. If not, not cool. We'll see how history goes this time around.
I don't play one my of favourite games of all time, Bloodborne, because it's forever stuck at 1080p 30fps with terrible loading times on a PS4 solely due to these stupid exclusivity deals.
All the other games built in the same engine by the same studio are released on Xbox and PC.
I see what you mean, but that wasn't the best example. Bloodborne wasn't a mere exclusivity deal. Sony published the game, owns the IP, and co-developed the game with the now dead Japan Studio. They own Bloodborne the same way they own Ratchet and Clank (20 years before they aquired the primary developers of that IP). FromSoft has no more control over Bloodborne than Monolith has over Xenogears/Xenosaga.
The producer of Bloodborne doesn't even work at Sony anymore. There's a multitude of reasons Sony is dragging their feet there, unrelated to aquisitions.
>The court ruling even agrees with Microsoft in theory about the Nintendo Switch being part of the console market, but also accepts the FTC can reasonably claim it’s not.
> The FTC insists the Nintendo Switch’s pricing, performance, and content make it an improper substitute at least for purposes of its preliminary injunction motion
I have to kinda agree with the FTC. I consider the Switch to be a very different device than the XBox/PS with different uses as far as the gaming experience I expect. The XBox or PS, on the other hand, I expect to have similar experiences.
As I understand it, but the rest of this is based on skimming the ruling, the judge has to take into account whether the merger will help or hinder customers. MS said "Call of Duty isn't even on all the consoles now, it's just on Playstation and XBox. Let the merger go through and we will port it to the Switch. See how we don't play favorites for our console.". The FTC's response was "there isn't real market for console players of games like COD released on Switch, the Switch isn't a competitor to the XBox for this game"
It is. The court is basically saying here "We'll accept your argument that the Switch isn't in the same market because it doesn't matter. You're wrong either way."
They do this again later on in regards to the FTC's arguments that cloud gaming and multi-game subscription services are functionally separate markets.
The portability doesn’t matter. Nintendo operates in a different market segment because of the hardware specs, and games they support. If you want to play the latest Call of Duty, Halo, God of War, Elden Ring… then Sony and Microsoft are competing for your business (sometimes with exclusive contracts), Nintendo is not. Their consoles wouldn’t be able to support those games.
Call of Duty will be available for Switch under Microsoft. Halo and God of War are platform exclusives. But so are Tears of the Kingdom and various Mario titles. Elden Ring is the only game listed that's not available for Switch but is on both others.
Even then, there are a ton of games that are available across all platforms, including some AAA ones:
Mortal Kombat 11
The Witcher 3
Assassins's Creed (multiple)
Skyrim
Resident Evil (multiple)
Monster Hunter Rise
Overwatch 2
etc...
The Switch runs plenty of previous generation games, because it’s capable of supporting them. The Switch wouldn’t support MW 2, and Microsoft have not announced any plans to release that game, or any upcoming CoD game on it.
The reason Microsoft and Sony sign exclusive deal is mostly the keep games off each others platforms. Graphics-intensive “AAA” games aren’t going to run on the switch. Nintendo undeniably operates in a distinct segment, even if it’s capable of supporting some limited amount of overlap with the other vendors.
It’s something MS has been saying numerous times, including in the FTC court case.
The number of games that are exclusive to a platform that are paid to be that way is actually quite small. Almost all platform exclusives come from companies that are subsidiaries of their respective platform company (343 Studios, Naughty Dog, etc).
The argument of graphic capabilities as something that defines the Switch to be in a different market that’s that of Sony/MS is a straw man argument, IMO. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere in these comments, it’s still competing for peoples’ video game time.
Sorry buddy, you’ve fallen for fake news. Microsoft has said they’ll bring it to Nintendo, not the Switch, and the timeframe they’ve announced for this is sometime in the next 10 years. Most non-tabloid commentators seem to think this means it will either be delivered by a streaming service, or to a yet-to-be announced new console. In any case, if it happens it will have to be accompanied by a shift in Nintendo’s position in the market.
> As I’ve mentioned elsewhere in these comments, it’s still competing for peoples’ video game time.
Penguin and Scholastic are both competing for peoples book reading time, yet they quite clearly compete in different market segments. Your argument is contrived and ignores the fact that consumers understand how these products are differentiated to appeal to different preferences.
All market segments have subsets and supersets. Why should the line be drawn where you imply?
Is Sony monopolizing the God of War market because God of War fans understand how those games are differentiated to appeal to their preferences?
The FTC's case that PS and Xbox exist in their own "high-performance console" market is the contrived argument. Honestly, it's dated to even consider consoles their own market. Product planning practice in the games industry these days pretty much looks at 2 markets: the mobile market and the "HD market" (PC + console).
I didn’t invent this segment, the market did when Nintendo had the insight to gamble on there being demand for lower-powered consoles (and more recently with an added focus on portability) to play less graphically demanding games on. A decision consumers subsequently validated by buying over 100,000,000 of them. Granted it wasn’t that much of a gamble, as by the time they made the Switch, this had already become Nintendo’s entire brand identity.
The Switch simple can’t do the same things that an Xbox or PlayStation can do. Many of those consoles top selling games would not be playable on a Switch, because they’re high performance games that require high performance hardware, and the Switch simply isn’t a viable substitute for that. Even for the most graphically demanding games that can run on a Switch, they can only do so with comparatively low resolution and frame rate, which in case you didn’t know, are major selling points for the segments that Microsoft/Sony are competing in.
If you don’t want to accept these plainly obvious facts, why don’t you go and inform r/NintendoSwitch that it’s a viable substitute for a PS5, and see how many people you can convince?
>The Switch simple can’t do the same things that an Xbox or PlayStation can do. Many of those consoles top selling games would not be playable on a Switch, because they’re high performance games that require high performance hardware, and the Switch simply isn’t a viable substitute for that. Even for the most graphically demanding games that can run on a Switch, they can only do so with comparatively low resolution and frame rate, which in case you didn’t know, are major selling points for the segments that Microsoft/Sony are competing in.
Absolutely no one is arguing this and it's not the point. You should give the commentators on this forum more credit than thinking we aren't aware of the power/capabilities differences.
The "high-end console gaming market" is what is what people are taking issue with. It's such a limiting segmentation and is arguably not a very good definition. There's a console gaming market as a whole, with a subset of it being high-end, that competes on user's gaming time. In my view, that's how it should be defined. There's also the mobile gaming market. Are we to now say the Switch shouldn't belong in the mobile gaming market because of screen size and power capabilities? It doesn't make sense to define the Switch in its own, standalone market. What would it be? Mid-tier portable gaming market? One that has no competitors and it has a monopoly in? That's not practical nor reflective of gaming purchasing habits.
Segregating the market based on capabilities breaks down in many ways. The argument shouldn't be that the Switch should belong in its own category because many people who own an Xbox or a Playstation also happen to own a Switch. Nearly half of Xbox owners also happen to own Playstation console (myself included) so does the fact that there's an overlap now mean that Xbox and PlayStation should be somehow in their own category? Of course not. Nor should the argument be about how it's played. One can that the Switch can be played in a portable manner but I just as easily play on my Playstation or Xbox through my iPad locally or even the cloud. Yes, it's not a popular option but the capabilities are there. All that's left is arguing about whether or not something can play AAA games in higher fidelity. If fidelity is something a gamer is truly after, they'd be buying a PC.
Understandable. Nintendo is full of exclusives + it's the best selling console too (by the court's admission) and that's ok so as MS buying Actiblizz. Otherwise I don't know how would Nintendo get a pass lol, they are the worst with exclusives (and what ends up on mobile is p2w thrash)
>If the Court was the final decisionmaker on the merits, it would likely find Nintendo
Switch part of the relevant market. But it is not. Instead, on a 13(b) preliminary injunction, the
FTC need only make a “tenable showing that the relevant market” is Gen 9 consoles. Given the plethora of internal industry documents and the acknowledged differences, the FTC has met its preliminary injunction burden to show the Switch is not included
in the relevant market.
>Nintendo made “technical decisions to enable an experience that they thought their customers would want to have, and it’s the best selling console right now in the market. So when I — when people try to tell me it’s not competition — competitive, for any number of reasons, I don’t believe
that because I just look at what’s selling
Was Nintendo buying up huge companies? Honest question, if Nintendo achieved their market position on their own merits, without abusing their monopoly (do they have one?), would that fall in the jurisdiction of the FTC?
The judges son works for Microsoft.
This is not only conflict of interest but corruption at its absolute core.
I knew the FTC would lose this case. I am not surprised.
It does not matter if the FTC had a case or not. I do not believe it received a fair trail.
There are laws and case law that set standards of varying degrees of precedent that both parties and the judge need to form their arguments around. The losing side can appeal to other courts and, in this case, the FTC can continue their own internal trial that has been scheduled for over a year and a half (surely, purely coincidentally scheduled for a month after the deal would contractually fall through). The same FTC that was extensively prepped and assisted in this trial by Sony and Google. The same Sony that has European Playstation headquarters in the UK, where it employs a lot of locals and where it announced a new modern office build shortly before the UK’s CMA announced it would block the Microsoft deal. All of the above whom own plenty of index funds that include copious amounts of Microsoft stock.
Go searching for connections and you’ll find them every which way. I suppose we should declare everything illegitimate and corrupt, go back to atomized subsistence farming.
Oh, I shared plenty specific to the case that you've glossed right over. Why does your observation matter more than any of mine?
Do you have a theory of how the tenuous connection you state might induce a district court judge to risk harming her career by making a flimsy decision that can be overturned or, worse, risk criminal prosecution if she was found to be conspiring in illegal dereliction of her duty?
What's the scenario you're implying? You haven't even made an argument. The deal expands a business segment that accounts for less than 10% of Microsoft's revenue, it's not going to make her son rich in stock options. He's 3-4 years into his career and has held an entry-level role at Microsoft less than a year, it's not going to rocket him to the top of the org chart. What's the incentive to induce whatever crimes or corruption you leave unspoken?
You conveniently ignored the argument a sibling poster made that the FTC chose their venue. Why choose this one?
Your take is tabloid pundit banter. Extending such disproportionate knee-jerk prescriptions upon such thin logic would grind any activity to a halt.
Generally, it's up to the judge to decide whether they should recuse themselves from the case. But I think it's fair game to raise such a concern.
Making up theories of how the judge could actually be conspiring to favor one party over the other is really unnecessary.
You know that the law isn't as concrete as you implied, right? It's not merely a mechanical application of rules. There's a lot of room for interpretation, and the interpretation of the rules and how they apply to the factual context has a huge influence to the outcome of the case. Skilled judges are able to write up reasons for awarding the case to either party. When two parties decide to go to court instead of settling, generally their lawyers do believe they have a reasonable chance of winning in court. So it's often not even hard for a judge to justify their decision. Having a judge who is ever so slightly biased towards one party would make it really difficult for the other party to play on a level ground.
There are usually no explicit incentives required for a judge to be biased. Just a general impression of "oh, these Microsoft people are quite nice, my son often tells me about the perks he enjoys at work" _could_ be sufficient to give Microsoft a slight but significant advantage in the case.
In general, I don't think you have any idea how the justice system works, and how delicate it can be. I don't know where you got your dismissive tone from. It's quite obvious you don't know sh!t.
If their son works for Microsoft in a position unrelated to this deal, there's absolutely no conflict of interest unless you actually prove real attempts to influence the resolution.
Do you have a reference (case law, practice directions, code of conduct, legislation, etc.) for your assertion, or are you just pulling that from your ___ ?
FTC knew the judges son works at Microsoft and this court/judge was pretty much their choice (Microsoft wanted a different judge in a different jurisdiction)
The FTC will never ask for a recursal. I know I would not. You cannot blatantly call a judge corrupt especially when you are a participant in that case.
If you are in the judiciary, your standards must be higher.
From the article:-
“Nothing antagonizes a judge with whom you might have litigation in the future like calling them recklessly biased,” he said. “What are the odds that Judge Corley would recuse if she was already choosing to brazen her way through this apparent conflict of interest?”
>The FTC will never ask for a recursal. I know I would not. You cannot blatantly call a judge corrupt especially when you are a participant in that case.
of course not. Law has much prettier words for that that the FTC could have used. The same words the article uses (they never use "corrupt" in the watchdog quotes).
Besides, I agree with the professor's arguments:
>“A rank-and-file employee at Microsoft would probably not have an interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome of this case. … She's right to look at [the fact that] the division that would be affected by the litigation is not where her son is employed,” he said.
It's the equivalent of some Wal-Mart lawsuit where a judge's grandson is working part time at Wal-Mart.
Just the UK CMA standing in the way then, with its flimsy decision resting almost entirely on speculation about the "cloud gaming" market.
Microsoft should be offering to to swear off cloud gaming entirely, they should be delighted. Game streaming is a lousy solution that requires enormous investment in specific infrastructure, it would be smart to ignore it and focus on their great subscription service that only requires a $500 Xbox.
Oh man, I hope they don't get rid of cloud gaming. It's been amazing, especially with their new partnership with GeForce Now (which IMO is the smarter move... rather than sunsetting xCloud entirely, just partner with Nvidia to make GFN the default since most cross platform Xbox/Windows games support controllers anyway).
Streaming games is an amazing convenience (and value) for those of us who don't want to be limited to an Xbox (poor graphics, limited mouse/keyboard support) but also don't want to shell out $3k for a RTX 4080 rig and all its associated noise and heat.
Where Stadia failed, GeForce Now, Luna, Shadow, and Xbox and PS streaming are still alive and well. And very useful!
I feel like it's only bad because it's still mostly a half-way house. Slapping existing AAA titles onto networked GPUs and calling it a day <> streaming gaming in my view.
Streaming gaming is actually a thing for me when someone builds a game using it that would absolutely not be possible using traditional technology. For example, an MMO so massive that the average player's network stack couldn't handle all of the events, so the only rational option is to render everything on some supercomputer and ship the final frames.
Consider also that you can get a lot of reuse out of a particular scene graph if multiple players are in the same one. Many such cases in streaming gaming. There are new, multi-server engine architectures that will not be possible until we start saying things like "this will be a streaming-only exclusive". That is probably the scariest proposal an MBA in any AAA studio could hear in 2023, so I don't expect you will see Blizzard or Sony playing in this flavor of traffic any time soon.
And the thing is, latency can be "good enough" for some games. I tried out the top end tier of GeForce NOW for a month just to see what it was like since I've always been skeptical of game streaming. I picked Last Epoch as a game since it has (had?) a reputation for being hard to run at 4k.
Even at 4k, I could play it and my views on game streaming have changed a bit. This was last year and I was using an i7 4770k based system. I can say pretty confidently that I found the local lag spikes from not having a high end gaming PC to be far more frustrating than the consistent 40ms of latency via streaming. Maybe it's because I'm getting older and don't have the same reflexes anymore, but I couldn't even really notice the latency via streaming.
I also think people are seriously overlooking the trend towards secure computing. What if you put a TPM in a video card? Then your video for the game stream can be encrypted and only gets decoded just before being sent to your HDCP compliant monitor. I think it's much harder to build cheats if the client side doesn't have any data to work with beyond video that gets decrypted as it's sent to your monitor.
Heck, even just a lack of local game data gets rid of most cheating, right?
> What if you put a TPM in a video card? Then your video for the game stream can be encrypted and only gets decoded just before being sent to your HDCP compliant monitor.
This is a fantastic idea. If you can get the GPU swap chain secured all the way from the datacenter's GPU, even the laziest cheaters would be forced to go buy specialized hardware to strip HDCP, and then find a way to get it back into the damn computer. What a fuckin nightmare, eh? It's almost like a job at that point. This is a massive barrier to entry and would likely eliminate 99%+ of "insecure" gaming experiences.
Could you do something even crazier like an HDMI pass thru terminal that detects the "secure gaming frame" via some signature and is able to decode it on the output? Sell em to gamers for $49.99 like it's a new kind of premium TV box? Doesn't change the security angle (can still break HDCP on the other side), and makes it so the gamer doesn't have to replace any PC hardware or software. Plug the box, load the streaming game website, enter your serial # to bind to your account, and off you go. You'd probably incur some extra latency using the external hardware, but with ASIC/FPGAs you could keep it right at 1-2 frames.
If I remember right this approach was a key pillar to the Xbox One at launch, with for example the Crackdown demo[1] using cloud for much more advanced physics/building destruction than the release game, with statements to effect of 3x the power of the console being available in the cloud.[2] With online only being a requirement when the One launched I think Microsoft tried something close to a streaming only exclusives, but at least at that point wasn't able to make it work.
You can fit a ton of data down a consumer's pipe. Can you actually design a game that would have those network requirements? A single frame of video is a ton of data compared to traditional game state constructs.
What's more exciting to me the client doesn't need that data or assets you can actually make games thatb need to be discovered though the game. No peeking local files or state for what's possible in the game.
Pure data rate is not a fantastic example. I'd also offer up something like large or dynamic assets (I think flight simulator is a good current example of that) or a game that is simply extremely big and needs a shitload of dram or GPU memory to keep around effectively.
Game streaming is a death sentence for game preservation. It will also be pretty bad for quality. Are your users playing a better older game? Kill it and replace with a worse more predatory one. And no one ever will be able to play the older game again.
>it would be smart to ignore it and focus on their great subscription service that only requires a $500 Xbox.
in the same way that nintendo thought it was smart to ignore online gaming for some 15 years, sure. It was true for a while. Until it wasnt
MS isn't doing this because it's immediately profitable. They feel it's the future, and they can iron out the technical issues. They want to be in the forefront when that arrives instead of playing catchup.
Also, more obviously: Gamepass is on Android and Android isn't playing those games natively. It's another way to target the mobile market.
This fight isn't over yet. Nevermind the misleading title. The fight is only beginning. FTC lost on the injunction, which was only sought when MSFT brazenly threatened to close the deal when it learned it would not be approved. MSFT still has a monkey on their back. Khan is far from giving up. Perhaps FTC can get a stay pending an appeal to the 9th Cir. The July 18 deadline to close is rapidly approaching.
This sounds the same as the student loan forgiveness people saying the Supreme Court decision is just the start of Biden’s fight. “He’s not defeated, this is just a small loss but he’ll definitely win the war.”
Khan has lost 2 major cases recently, which isn’t a good look for her tenure so far. I don’t see how this case is recoverable considering how poorly it’s gone so far. With the EUs backing and the short time table, this deal seems essentially approved.
Better to lose 2 cases than to not try to appeal the mergers at all. The FTC finally is growing some teeth under Khan, and even if they aren’t winning all cases, mergers are under much more scrutiny internally in companies. It’s no longer a „will definitely go through“ kind of thing.
Khan is doing the right thing for the consumers here, and we can only hope that she perseveres.
I find the whole thing to be a tempest in a teapot -- why is the FTC involved in this at all? For christ's sake it's a video game! If we were discussing access to some critical resource I would understand, but how is this not a criminal waste of our government's time and resources? It reminds me of the congressional baseball steroid hearings.
Am I totally off base here? Can anyone explain to me why this case is so critical?
You're totally off base. Video games are not just kids stuff. The industry makes nearly three times more money than the film industry. This is exactly the kind of stakes that FTC should be getting involved in.
Both of these industries are entertainment though -- and to me at least it seems there's a pretty limited amount of consumer harm that could come from various IP exclusivity deals.
Again -- am I thinking about this wrong? What is the consumer harm that could result from the moving of IP from one company to another? A truly dedicated fan has to buy a different console to play their favorite game? Non-truly dedicated fans play one of the hundreds of other FPS games on the market that work with their console of choice?
If at some point consumers have to pay more than they would in a more competitive market, how is that not harm? If you believe that this is a move that will result in less consumer choice and more possibility for MS to extract more $$$$, then you don't like it.
>If at some point consumers have to pay more than they would in a more competitive market, how is that not harm?
No one HAS to pay for entertainment. It's a pure luxury. There's tons of things you can do with your free time besides playing video games (let alone brand-new AAA console titles): go outside, take a hike, play an instrument, take up a hobby, socialize, learn to cook, write your own software, I could go on and on. You can even do other forms of entertainment with your time: watch a movie or TV series, watch YouTube, watch a sports game, actually play in a sports game, play retro video games on archive.org or in an emulator, etc. All these things compete with (modern Activision) video games for time.
I'm not sure this is absurdity. The point is that no company could possibly have an abusable monopoly on entertainment because A) the sheer variety of things there are to do for entertainment, B) the incredibly low barriers to entry in entertainment, and C) that even if there were some entity that gained control over some significant portion of it, that vast majority of people would just do something, anything else rather than submit to such a monopolist's demands. They might be grumpy about it on some level, but that's hardly rising to the level of consumer harm. You might say there is still the case of some tiny number of incredibly dependent people who would continue playing and paying for certain titles no matter the cost, but that is their decision -- they are not without agency to simply say no, and so even that doesn't rise to the level of consumer harm.
As I mentioned in another comment, what if, after completing this acquisition, MS decided to raise the price of CoD to $100,000 per player per year? Would this really harm consumers? Would people really be forced to sell their homes and kidneys?
Of course not. They'd just play another game, or watch a movie or something.
If someone wants to play video games, they can do it for free on archive.org, and all they need is a web browser.
Because it's not a material good that gets in the way of my ability to live. And I say that despite working in entertainment. If a dam breaks down or is owned by some coporate entity that means people may not have access to water.
If Disney owns every single videgame/movie/music/etc and I detest Disney... I find some other pasttime. Hell, maybe I just focus more on foreign media. Sucks for my work but I can find a new job outside of the Mouse. It's a relative minor impact.
>If at some point consumers have to pay more than they would in a more competitive market, how is that not harm?
that's my exact issue. If I can't pay for insulin, I die. if I can't afford COD 2025... what? I don't get to play a video game? Is that "harm" in the traditional sense?
> If you believe that this is a move that will result in less consumer choice and more possibility for MS to extract more $$$$, then you don't like it.
Me not liking something =/= harm. I don't like mushrooms but I wouldn't say they harm me. I just don't like the texture or taste.
The FTC is getting involved, because the goal is to make Big Tech smaller not more bigger, and more dominant through acquiring independent studios with major titles, such as they did with $7B Bethesda, and now 65B+ Activision deal. These are huge IPs, that have large amounts of players, and can give a company like MSFT huge control in gaming, and in the metaverse,etc in the future, which is another nascent field. But far off, that they have not mentioned it in the case or with the public.
For one, lack of consumer choice. To play those games, I would need to buy an Xbox, whereas for the last 20 years, Call of Duty, etc. has been multiplatform.
That's literally one game. That's it. Lack of consumer choice when it comes to a single title shouldn't be something that the FTC is getting involved in. Even when you expand that to all the titles that activision/blizzard produce we're talking a tiny drop in a literal ocean of consumer choice.
Activision has dozens of famous titles, and a huge IP catalog from the 80's which they can make 100's of exclusives. The $68 Billion price tag tells itself of it's importance in gaming.
Should corporations the size of Microsoft (almost 25x of Sony, the 2nd nearest competitor) be allowed to make acquisitions of this size to grow itself, and weaken competition. Antitrust law is one of the FTC's mandates, then this is what they are tasked to do.
When (tech) corporations are too big, I can think of many ways it can cause destruction to society. Only have to look at Facebook in the 2016 election. And tech companies will continue to grow, and become too big to fail, unless reigned upon as with past crises, like with banks. Only this time, they have all your information, can surveil you, etc, and with AI pretty soon.
>Should corporations the size of Microsoft (almost 25x of Sony, the 2nd nearest competitor) be allowed to make acquisitions of this size to grow itself, and weaken competition.
Sure. Becuase they aren't even a monopoly in the gaming space to begin with. If you could simply outspend to become a major gaming competitor, Amazon should be #1 by now.
It's clearly not that simple so I'm not concerned about Sony suddenly declining. And meanwhile, Nintendo sits in its own throne above Sony/MS as if it's watching two children on a playground.
> I can think of many ways it can cause destruction to society. Only have to look at Facebook in the 2016 election.
Do you really think a loosely historical shooter game most people use to compete against one another will be used to control information for national elections? I simply don't see it, but who knows?
Even if so: the big issue with that comparison is that your grandparents aren't playing COD. Mine were on FB around that time.
Money in itself is not an argument for FTC involvement. E.g. the wedding industry is also enormous, within an order of magnitude of the video game industry in the US.
That's just it though -- video games are not "monopolized" in any meaningful sense. A particular IP may be "monopolized" -- e.g. owned by a particular company that has more or less of an interest in producing cross platform versions. But that's not really a monopoly, is it?
Microsoft is neither close to eating Steams lunch nor is this acquisition going to change anything about the competitive landscape. Microsoft is currently a distant third place behind Sony and Nintendo, and after this acquisition they are... still a distant third.
If Microsoft is ever in a position where a single merger will materially threaten to catapult them over Sony or Nintendo, then that would be the time to block the deal. In the meantime, I would prefer if the FTC doesn't kill off deals because someday, in the far distant future, the companies involved may be in a more dominant position.
If anything, blocking this deal does nothing but protect Sony's already dominant position from one of their sole competitors making up even a small amount of ground.
> Will the courts allow Microsoft to buy Sony gaming business?
Why not? What would it matter to the players on these consoles? Is demand for certain titles so price insensitive that Microsoft could then jack up the price by 100% and people would still buy them? Even if that's true (it's almost certainly not) the barriers to entry in the video game business are extremely low, so this would just create an enormous opportunity and pissed off consumers would jump to a newly created platform.
>Will the courts allow Microsoft to buy Sony gaming business?
The gaming business, sure. The rest of Sony is still HQ'd in Japan and in fact manages many semi-needed and needed busineses, so there's zero chance MS buys Sony as a whole.
>Microsoft is also getting ready to eat Steam’s lunch for a while on the PC side
Didn't go too well last decade. Best of luck this time.
Games are bigger than most movies. Besides, gaming was responsible for a lot of innovation in computing, we all know how well that will go under a Microsoft monopoly.
A lot of the StarCraft guys have already left and formed their own company (frost giant). They are making a quasi spiritual successor to StarCraft called StormGate.
Single-purchase retail like Starcraft 1 & 2 simply doesn't make sense as an exclusive revenue source for small studios anymore, you're not likely to sell enough copies. The revenue isn't there. You've got to sell cosmetics, battle passes, or (barf) put in a gacha system. I'm not happy about it as a game dev but it's the reality. Even big games like Destiny 2 rely heavily on those microtransactions to rake in the cash. :(
This is especially bad for multiplayer where you need high player counts so people can get into matches quick. Indie multiplayer games HAVE to be free or very inexpensive.
At first glance it looks/feels a lot more like Total Annihilation / Supreme Commander than StarCraft. Very robot focused. A sense that Armada and Cortex are very balanced. StarCraft has a more asymmetrical set of factions, where their strengths, economies, units, etc. at least feel more distinct.
I hope they decide to revive Heroes of the Storm, even dedicating a small team to continue putting out content would be a massive win. The previous team had a ton of content that was nearly ready to ship before leadership canned the project.
As much as i want Blizzard games included in Game Pass, this will end up resulting in lower quality games titles . Fewer studios are going to be able to compete
Most likely, it will:
1. First, be good for consumers short-term as MS floods the market with high quality cheap content.
2. Next, be bad for the games industry medium term as their product gets devalued and only the biggest winner-take-all free to play games can compete vs. the value of bundled content
3. Next, be bad for gaming employees and entrepreneurs as the value of their roles gets squeezed and the nature of working in the industry become more constrained and formulaic
4. Finally, end up bad for consumers when the quality and variety of viable gaming products declines.
Sadly, the FTC and CMA chose to base their cases on a bunch of abject nonsense, so I'm grateful that the FTC has rightfully lost the crummy case that it made. And the CMA is also about to rightfully lose / surrender next.
But the key words of my take are "most likely". Games market changes too much to make long term predictions about. The countervailing forces are increasingly cheaper and easier creator tools, as well as the rising difficulty of maintaining a meaningful hardware edge.
From the public policy perspective, it's much more urgent to come up with meaningful and sound legal doctrines against excessive market power than it is to litigate speculative crap based on the optics of resisting big price tags. Lina Khan's performative career boosterism has been a huge failure because she's just as greedy and anti-social as every stereotype about corporate management. But I have faith that a framework which doesn't rely on spectacle and punditry can be found. The EU is trailblazing in that area where the US and UK are still completely primitive.
Meh, maybe with Microsoft's kind of accessibility support, Blizard can get more of a go-ahead to make Hearthstone, and other games, accessible. We've seen with the GuideDev Hearthstone mod that it's possible.
Now Zork belongs to MS. Release it under MIT and everyone would win a great history of gaming (and the right to create new histories in the Zorkverse without worrying).
Spiritwrak it's a good example.
In case of anyone says "text adventures have no future"... the folk lore from a distant past made Disney rich. The Arturian legends plus some samurai touches set into a futuristic space made George Lucas and Lucasfilms loaded, too.
I think Microsoft might be willing to release the Infocom build tools and engines under an MIT license – by now they would be of purely historical interest, similar to open-sourcing MS-DOS 1.0 and 2.0.
I'm not sure if they'd be willing to do so for the game assets (the room/item descriptions/etc) – it would remove one of the main legal barriers to a competitor creating their own game set in the Zork universe. The Fortran 77 version of Zork has long been available under a "non-commercial use only" license, so they might be willing to release the game assets under such a license too (or maybe a more modern equivalent such as CC-BY-NC or CC-BY-NC-SA)
> We already have build tools for infocom against the Z-Machine
The TOPS-20 versions of ZILCH (and ZAP) don't seem to be available.
The ITS version of ZILCH from MIT has been recovered, but (from what I understand) it is an earlier version, and the TOPS-20 version which Infocom used later isn't publicly available, and that later version had added features.
In any case, its copyright status is murky, Microsoft could clean up that murkiness.
Maybe it's just sour grapes from me, but it feels like a lot of these acquisitions are for has-been companies that were great 10+ years ago but haven't had much success lately. Bethesda, Double Fine, and now Activation Blizzard.
The game Blizzard just released, Diablo 4, was the “best-selling opening in Blizzard’s history, crossing an auspicious $666 million in global sell-through in the first five days following its June 6 launch”. https://investor.activision.com/news-releases/news-release-d...
I don't think I've heard sell-through used before as a metric in that way, typically I recall seeing it as a percentage such as 80% of units shipped to stores have sold through to consumers. Units sold is what I typically see, like Diablo 3 at 30mil. Maybe sell through here means people buying platinum/cosmetics as well?
No comment on Bethesda or Activision, but Psychonauts 2 had an average Metacritic score of ~90. Not sure how their financials look but Double Fine seems to be doing OK. Their previous two titles had shakier scores but don't look like they were big failures or anything.
Activision isn’t successful? They own several of the biggest franchises in console, PC and mobile. 2022 was a record year for them - over $7b in revenue - and that was before Diablo IV shipped.
Someone please correct me if I'm way off the mark here: I assume the reason behind this purchase is to keep Windows relevant as a gaming platform. It looks as though Windows is becoming less relevant overall as a computing platform, and alternative platforms such as Steam Deck are beginning to pose a major threat to one of their major market demographics: Gaming.
Windows has been a decent development platform for Linux via Proton. ;)
Maybe they are just worried about the long game of Proton eventually eroding MS's share? But this looks more like propping up Xbox and Gamepass than Windows losing share (at least short term).
I'm confused how you came to that conclusion. Steam isn't threatening Windows gaming because a linux installed device sold 2m units. An Windows is still very relevant for computing despite more enterprise trying to move off Windows to avoid licensing cost.
I think the reason is much simpler and smaller scale: Microsoft has always been behind in the gaming space and a huge 3rd party company with valuable IPs can bolster some incentive to buy Xbox and even PC's. It also further gives value to gamepass which seems to be their big focus this generation.
We know from history that exclusives are incredibly important in the console industry.
Microsoft buying ATVI will net them ownership over one of the most important game IPs of the last three console generations.
The only way this decision makes any sense is that the courts are somehow thinking that 10 years is long enough and things will be different by the time MS is in the position to tilt the deck to their favour by making parts of or the entirety of this franchise a platform exclusive.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is already 16 years old, so the courts are likely wrong as this franchise clearly has remarkable staying power to still be this relevant.
This is a very good thing for gamers. It reminds me of the Sprint/T-mobile merger, which was a huge win for consumers, allowing T-mobile to actually put pressure on ATT and Verizon.
Activision is a terrible company whose iron grip on their beloved IP (bought from Blizzard and Infinity Ward) has been absolutely stifling to the industry. They are almost singlehandedly responsible for everything that sucks about gaming now.
I think Microsoft’s reason for why they feel they need this is exactly the reason why this is bad.
Shouldn’t Microsoft build a compelling cloud gaming service that both customers want to pay for, and publishers want to publish on? Microsoft should build good gaming hardware and services, and people buy them based on the merits of those products rather than acquiring companies just to prop up their efforts and otherwise restrict consumers.
> just to prop up their efforts and otherwise restrict consumers.
Consumers aren't being restricted.
Quite the opposite, Microsoft purchasing this IP is causes them to release those games on more platforms. All activision games with be on Gamepass, steam, as well consoles when that wasn't automatically the case before.
Its a bit late to jump in here, but I would just like to share the observation that 90% of the comments here look like they were crafted by Microsoft's PR deparment.
The rule expecting good faith arguments is entirely moot if corporate players can sic their squads of goons on social media.
Almost every comment is something like: "Well, big corporations gonna be corporating, what you gonna do?" or "MS is bad, but are they as bad as [Insert distraction here]" or "I love this move, please promote me microsoft."
And here people will still believe this isn't happening, when the evidence is clear to see for anyone with a slightly skeptical mind.
Microsoft still needs more studios to make Game Pass a “Netflix for Gaming” service. WoW and CoD and the rest of the ActiBlizz back catalog help but Microsoft still doesn’t have enough studios to be pumping out a new major release every month.
The idea of subscribing to get games (movies and TV shows) instead of buying to own them Netflix is certainly still doing. Constant, consistent revenue by having people subscribe instead of paying a bunch to market to them and hope it is a blockbuster, to me at least, seems far more sustainable for publishers and developers.
I'm not impressed with Sony's tantrums over this, they've been throwing money around for exclusivity for years, ranging from exclusive content in major titles (Destiny and CoD have often been 'definitive' on PlayStation) to outright title exclusivity.
I'm probably not a good source of opinion on this, Acti-Blizz has become a toxic company that doesn't really make games I like anymore, and I resent them for holding Heretic and Hexen hostage even during this renaissance of throw back FPSs.. there's too much money to be made elsewhere for them to do something like that.. maybe I'm being suckered but seeing Phil in that Hexen tshirt made me hopeful. I'm also an old and bitter Warcraft RTS fan, they ignored RTS Warcraft entirely for years after WoW became their focus, and when they finally did give Warcraft III attention they completely destroyed the community and arguably made the game worse for everybody. They could have done absolutely nothing and everything would be better!
In short, unless I was a big fan of their current offerings (I am not) I don't see how Microsoft could possibly make things worse, so I'm slightly optimistic about the changes this acquisition will bring. Worst case scenario the dumpster fire gets bigger. I'm sure people who love the current offerings have very different feelings about this.
> I don't see how Microsoft could possibly make things worse, so I'm slightly optimistic
I'd look at what they've done with the Minecraft IP since buying it - main game gets no love, infrequent updates, etc., whilst they churn out side-projects like Dungeons and load up Bedrock with monetisation. For sure, it's not "worse" but it's a million miles away from what should have been under good ownership.
I'm not a Minecraft player so I probably can't speak to this but sometimes all I want in an existing product is infrequent updates.. little quality of life improvements, patches that keep the game running properly on modern OS/hardware, that kind of thing.
It's all we wanted from Warcraft III. They shut down the existing game and replaced it with the remaster, which had a significant number of previously present features absent or broken. Even now years later it's a zombie product that has essentially been left to die.
Again I'm not in the loop on Minecraft but I would be very surprised if Microsoft has mistreated it anywhere near as badly as Blizzard has Warcraft III.
Definitely. It is an unoptimised shambles of a mess - mods can improve the performance by sometimes multiple orders of magnitude.
A simple(ish) block game should not chug at sub-60fps rates on a gaming PC when I can run something like Just Cause 2 at a solid 4K60 with all the graphics turned up.
> Notch didn't exactly age well in the last 12 years or so
I know it is just wishful thinking but I hope Microsoft restore legacy warcraft 3 so I can play the original campaigns and not the hot mess they made with reforged.
How could closing the deal look like in practice while the UK is blocking it? Would that mean Microsoft can't sell Activision Blizzard games in the UK?
This is just from eyeballing the top results of some Google searching so may not be super accurate, but it looks like the console games market is around $34 billion a year in the US, $11 billion a year in the EU, and under $1 billion a year in the UK.
The merger has been approved by EU and now US regulators.
The UK market might be small enough compared to the US and the EU that Microsoft and Activision might find it worthwhile to just leave the UK console game market if they had to choose between that and not being able to complete the merger.
When did that happen? On the dedicated CMA page[0] about the inquiry I see nothing since the draft final order[1] in May, which absolutely does not approve it. Quote:
On 5 May 2023, the CMA made an Interim Order pursuant to section 81 of the
Act preventing each of Microsoft and Activision and all members of their
Groups of Interconnected Bodies Corporate from acquiring in the other any
interest conferring control within the meaning of section 26 of the Act
Yeah as a former Blizzard fanboy I'm not sure anyone could do more damage to Blizzard than Blizzard did to itself. The only direction Microsoft could take them is up.
When, not if Call of Duty and many others Activision Blizzard has goes Xbox and PC exclusive, some people are going to get pies and eggs on their faces that is for sure. Also more consolidation of the gaming industry isn't good in the long run as it clearly opens the door for the big players to buy up even more assets. I can clearly see Microsoft buy EA, Sega and Square Enix now as a example.
What that commenter meant is that it clearly opens the door for further consolidation of the gaming industry. I can clearly see for example Microsoft buying Sega and Square Enix as we saw that filing (1) or Sony buying Konami or Nintendo buying studios. They're surely going to be coming and it's going to be bad for consumers in the long run limiting choices.
Yes. The starting gun for consolidation and less for the consumer. Another grave mistake.
But as long as you throw enough money at the judges and bribing regulators, perhaps you do get away with monopolistic practices. Microsoft will never change and cannot be trusted.
They will continue their horizontal integration of games studios and apply their lock in with their game-pass platform over a so-called 10 year pinky promise which they can make all other new games exclusive anyway afterwards.
I like how everyone forgets that it wasn't Sony, Nintendo or even the PC market that put the XBOX division in the position they are, it was themselves.
At the start of last generation, XBOX decided to shot themselves [1] and announce that the XBOX One would be an always online media (not gaming) machine that would require itself to phone home frequently or it wouldn't even work at all offline during vacations. They spent more time trying to sell you a media brick with features no was or is asking for to this day, instead of showing games which is the whole point of a console (Sony capitalized on this by showcasing nothing but games). They asked 100$ more than Sony's console ($499vs$399), and iirc, the console had weaker hardware which lead to many games running worse on it.
Over the years they've also destroyed all their first party studio franchises besides Forza which is still going strong, this includes Halo which has been more misses than hits in the last decade plus. I'm in no way saying they weren't commercial hits, you can sell well and still be a bad or broken product (Cyberpunk 2077) that ends up poisoning the well.
XBOX first party games are also notorious for their predatory monetization, just as much if not more so than EA or ACTIVISION Blizzard, does anyone even remember how bad GoW5 was?
Another thing people seem to be forgetting is that XBOX isn't just trying to acquire ACITIVSION Blizzard. They've been on a shopping spree, including the likes of ZeniMax Media [2] which included subsidiaries such as Bethesda Softworks, Arkane Studios, id Software... as well as other solo studios like Obsidian Entertainment known for amazing RPG classics, Ninja Theory behind Hellblade, as well as plenty of other studios since 2018 [3], please check for yourself and see what they're doing.
They've shown that they don't care about you, the consumer, time and time again, willingly putting out titles such as Redfall at full price (70€£$) without a care. They've shown that they'll immediately pull games out of Playstation [4][5] so that they can compete with Sony by using brute force, hell, I'm sure if allowed, they would've tried to acquire Sony Interactive Entertainment from the Sony Group, if not the whole group itself. (Sony Group 113.89 billion USD vs Microsoft 2.47 trillion USD)
Lets talk about cloud gaming, the "Future" of gaming. Gamepass is a good deal, yes, but like every SAAS model, it means you don't own anything, not digitally, not physically, you can't even modify files, and prices are subject to change, and change they do [6]. Now think about that, you can't modify files... If you play more than 2-3 games a year, I'm sure one of the first things you've done is mess around with the .ini file because the in-game menu is lacking settings. I'm sure you've had to install mods because the game was broken at launch and it was the modding community who fixed it, or you simply wanted mods. What happens in a few years when they do what Netflix or HBO does, and they remove games they don't want to pay licensing for?[7] or when they terminate an online game and you have no way of making your own private servers to keep it alive? Right now, a lot of games that came out before 2010 simply can't be legally purchased[8], this problem gets worse the older the titles are, especially if you go into the retro game list. But they hold their IP rights, which means you can't even legally distribute ROMs or else you run the risk of companies like Nintendo coming after you.
Finally, it's Microsoft. They aren't known for their pro-consumer policies. They're known for being ruthless and exploitative. Windows 11 is filled with ads and forces you to use their products with shady behavior such as making you jump through hops to set a different browser as the default. The XBOX division is no different and this tribalism surrounding consoles (PSvsXBOX) which leads to people publicly defending a trillion dollar company online because the FTC is fighting to preserve the consumer (them) is worrying.
EDIT: Forgot to mention Age of Empire 2 Definitive Edition as another game that is doing quite well, although AoE4 isn't quite as well, and was also initially a Windows Store only game, which further cements the fact that they don't control the PC market the way they want, Steam does.
>I like how everyone forgets that it wasn't Sony, Nintendo or even the PC market that put the XBOX division in the position they are, it was themselves.
I don't think anyone forgot, it's simply irrelevant. For one reason or another, they are 3rd place so these arguments against being a monopoly falls flat. As well as all the "company bad" arguments being made. If "company bad" was a sufficient argument no acquisition would be made ever.
But these aren't up to public opinion, it's up to courts.
> a media brick with features no was or is asking for to this day
nah, people really wanted those features... but MS was beat to the punch by much cheapter set top boxes. Then the rise of smart Tv's sealed the deal (even if the hardware for those absolutely suck). Bad foresight there, especially since they were promising a cable TV show for Halo in 2013, around the time Netflix was establishing itself as a major force.
>does anyone even remember how bad GoW5 was?
No, not really. GOW5 jumped off the Lootbox train extremely fast (<2 months after release or something). So EA/Activision/Epic was in the forefront there. Probably one of the smarter moves MS made. MS may have been bad, but they either had good PR or the competition was simply that much worse.
We all know no good games are coming from this company any more, and it is true for a long time now. Microsoft is the most anti-competitiveness corp in the world and Bobby's comments... They are really funny :) The sun is finally setting for Blizzard.
What a joke. Because Microsoft is now failing as a gaming company the past 10 years, they’ve been allowed to swallow up competiton.
Practically every game they’ve released or worked on the past 5 years has failed. Halo Infinite might literally be the biggest flop in entertainment history.
Because of Azure they’re able to absorb these losses and continue to consolidate and eat the competiton.
There’s tons of examples in the past of gaming studios that underperform and end up downsizing - Sega is a great example.
Meanwhile, Sony and Nintendo continue to release quality titles knowing they have no infinite money backing.
It’s funny that you mention Sony considering almost all of their first titles are from studios they’ve bought over the last 15 years. I guess it’s fine when Sony did it in the past to get ahead of the competition but now when Microsoft is doing it, it’s anticompetitive.
The fact is the only way Microsoft becomes competitive again is for the industry to switch to streaming
games. Thats why they’re buying all these studios. If Microsoft isn’t successful in the switch to streaming games, they are out of the gaming business cause they’ve lost the console wars and there’s no recovering at this point unless Sony significantly fucks up.
They lost the console wars because they released shit consoles with shit games. They were totally fine during the Xbox 360 era when they made excellent games.
Who’s to say Microsoft won’t continue to subsidize the Xbox division? They’ve failed at every turn this past decade and yet continue to get a blank check.
There is a difference in basically sponsoring the artistic abilities of a studio, versus buying one to shoulder out your competition, though. To pretend otherwise for Microsoft seems very disingenuous.
That is, for many of the studios that Sony has funded, it is easy to see a series of games that nobody else was willing to place bets on. For the ones that Microsoft is buying... Seems very very different.
Well that’s the idea, isn’t it? If you’re not doing well in your business you aren’t being anti-competitive by trying to buy your way back into the game. Hence, the decision to allow it.
“Anti consumer” is a catch all phrase with no legal relevance that people use to describe whatever behavior they don’t like from companies. The issue here would be “anti competitive” or “anti trust”, the definitions of which the judge certainly is aware of.
No, that is not the definition of anti-consumer behavior.
Anti-consumer behavior is not "losing money". Instead, anti-consumer behavior would be if Microsoft shuts down competition in some way, such that they are the monopoly market leader, and consumers can't buy from else where.
This isn't anywhere close to being true, given that microsoft is not the monopoly market leader in the gaming space. That award goes to Sony.
Anti-consumer behavior? I don't think so. Bailing out failing studios doesn't necessarily harm the consumer, and it's especially the case with dead-in-the-water studios like Activision-Blizzard. The alternative would be their corpse getting picked over by companies who want to buy up their IP, and that's certainly not what their consumers want.
If Microsoft is really subsidizing a failing business, they should be allowed to do so as long as they find it reasonable. I don't think Sony has the right to demand a favorable status-quo for their consoles if their competitors double down on software investments.
Activision-Blizzard-King is by no means a "failing studio" though. They are one of the most successful by nearly any metric. According to MacroTrends [0], "Activision Blizzard gross profit for the quarter ending March 31, 2023 was $1.718B, a 33.28% increase year-over-year."
Between powerhouses like CoD, the mobile division of both King's legacy titles like Candy Crush, and newer ones like Diablo Immortal, and Blizzard's Diablo 4 + WoW being very well received, the concern is primarily that instead of making better first party titles, Xbox just wants to acquire exclusive rights to already successful studios + publishers like Bethesda + now ABK. (Weather or not this will actually happen or not is anyone's guess. I'm assuming they will indeed make the titles exclusive).
The GP seems to be talking about how Microsoft's Xbox is the one being bailed out by Microsoft Azure / enterprise licensing allowing Xbox to continue to fumble with first party titles without being forced out of the market.
IMO the main reason for the uproar is that Microsoft is clearly leveraging their immense market share in the enterprise world to buy out the competition by acquiring studios that were formerly multi-platform and making them exclusive, which absolutely does seem to be anti-competitive and anti-consumer. (To be clear, I think Sony spending a ton of money on exclusivity contracts with Square Enix, etc. is also anti-consumer).
Half the reason that Microsoft has been buying game studios is because Sony has been buying game studios. Sony has even bought a game studio that Microsoft already bought and sold.
Among others, Sony's bought: Psygnosis (Lemmings), Incognito (Twisted Metal), Zipper Interactive (SOCOM), Sigil (Everquest), Evolution (WRC, Motorstorm), Bungie (Destiny), Polyphony (Gran Turismo), Santa Monica (God of War), Bend (Days Gone, Syphon Filter), Naughty Dog (Crash Bandicoot, Jak and Daxter, Uncharted, The Last of Us), Guerilla (Killzone, Horizon), Media Molecule (Little Big Planet), Sucker Punch (Ghost of Tsushima), Insomniac (Spyro, Ratchet & Clank, Spider-Man)... they basically have built their entire "first party" game catalog off of the companies they've acquired.
As someone said above “There is a difference in basically sponsoring the artistic abilities of a studio, versus buying one to shoulder out your competition”.
Bungee and maybe a few others are the exception, with the bungie purchase looking like a reaction to the activision purchase.
I completely get the point you are making but I wish I had a business that was "failing" like Xbox is. :P
You are right about the exclusives, they have not had anything that has really grabbed peoples attention long term for a long while. Halo Infinite felt like it was everywhere for about 2 weeks and then completely forgotten about. But others like God of War on PS have had legs for years.
The PC gaming market is thriving thanks to Steam and indies.
Playstation is doing well. Switch is doing great.
Microsoft? Aside from providing Windows and DirectX, they're basically invisible. Xbox is just a cheap wannabe PC with no great games. It's a wonder they've supported it for this long. Maybe this acquisition gives them a fighting chance against Sony and Nintendo.
It's not like Activision and Blizzard are even particularly beloved, just pumping out endless sequels. They're steady but relatively soulless cash machines that don't really innovate anymore anyway.
Having Microsoft in control might improve their internal cultures, maybe make Blizzard games finally available on Steam, get more and Bethesda Xbox games on GeForce Now, etc. Maybe even make more games cross platform and with good controller support. Those all seem great. Meanwhile the real innovation will continue to come from indies while the behemoths just keep pumping out new graphics (which are often just Unreal anyway, which is again not Microsoft).
Microsoft is just too minor to be dominant in modern gaming, and Activision is a has-been that just keeps making filler titles. It's not some great loss to the industry. Now if someone acquired Valve, that would be a tragedy...
> Playstation is doing well. Switch is doing great.
For now. Fortunes change pretty quick in the console world. One generation you are on top, the next you are struggling for second place.
MS buying Activision is bad. This gives MS a long term advantage. It signals to companies like Sony and Nintendo that they shouldn’t bother competing since they can never counter the buying out of huge publishers as they aren’t worth 2.47 trillion USD like Microsoft.
That just isn't true though. Sony and Nintendo have no problem competing at all by the quality of their first-party and exclusive games. For every Call of Duty there is a Horizons or a God of War or Zelda or whatever. Xbox is the worst of all the platforms in terms of that. Even PC and mobile have more (good) games that aren't available on Xbox.
Has Microsoft has any major successes since Halo and Fable, years and years ago? They're desperate for games. Activision isn't going to suddenly make the dominant overnight. If anything, it would barely help stop the bleeding. Microsoft is so far behind right now it's not funny. I'd be way more afraid of competition dying because Microsoft gave up on it rather than buying Activision.
The huge concern here is not that Microsoft can’t compete, because they can as they have far more studios than Sony does. The issue is their strategy overall which is top earning multi-platform companies, like Bethesda and ActiBlizz, to cut off revenue from competitors. Meanwhile Sony’s biggest acquisitions were studios that mainly focused on their platform to begin with.
MS is playing the long game. They don’t care about this generation. They want to win all future generations.
3rd party support plays a big part in a console’s success. MS is effectively buying out one of the largest 3rd party studios denying its competitors their support.
Does Activision have any major titles on the Switch right now? Nintendo seems happy to be doing their own thing. It's not like they need to buy huge publishers, since they own all the important IP (Mario, Zelda, 1/3 or 1/2 of Pokemon, etc)
If Microsoft caught up by building up 1st party studios nigh from scratch - which is what Sony did - I would have no complaints because anyone could do that. May the best company win.
Buying up one of the biggest publishers though. What’s Sony and Nintendo, whose combined market cap is less than 7% of MS’s, suppose to do? I don’t see how allowing “big money Pay 2 Win without a fight” in anyway benefits the consumer.
I don't think Market Cap is an honest metric to use here. Microsoft's Market Cap is that high comparatively because theyre diverse products in computer, cloud, and tech.
How much of that MC is solely X-box and how much do MS , Sony, and Nintendo own of that respectively? MS studios has been struggling. Activision also has been struggling to land some hits and only recently with Diablo 4 they have got some relief. So buying Activision is not a golden ticket.
> Now if someone acquired Valve, that would be a tragedy...
Honestly I would cherish the moment. It would be the most likely path to actually seeing HL3 released. The one time the filthy capitalists manage to do a good thing...
Valve to me has become a pathetic, rent-seeking platform owner. No clue why the gaming community still holds them in such regard. Linux support and not being publicly traded must be a massive deal for some gamers I suppose. The indie developers who launch on their platform are much more deserving of your attention & praise. The guys who developed battle bit have done more to improve my gaming experience than anything all of Valve has done since Portal 2 was released over a decade ago.
I don't think it's fair to understate the impact Steam has had on indie game dev. We went from "maybe hearing about this shareware on the PC Gamer floppy if you're lucky" to spamware sites like Tucows to a huge centralized marketplace of phenomenal games because the devs had a way to let people discover their one-hit wonder, get great reviews, etc.
Yes, I want HL3 as much as anyone, but Alyx was pretty cool (still one of the better VR demos), the Steam Deck is innovative in its own way (and Aperture Desk Job is a fun HL universe spinoff), GeForce Now integration is really useful for some of us, Cloud Save is awesome, etc. Not to mention the sales... because of Steam sales and resellers (isthereanydeal.com) games are far more affordable than they ever were before, especially compared to the consoles.
The platform is WORTH paying rent for. If you want to see how bad it could be otherwise, it's not a hypothetical... Epic, Windows Games Marketplace (or whatever it's called these days), GOG, etc. are all far inferior in terms of ease of use, features, selection, pricing, etc. As someone who's been PC gaming since Lode Runner and Commander Keen, Steam is by far the best thing that's happened to it in three decades. It was even more transformative than 3DFX or DirectX in terms of the quality and quantity of games made available to gamers.
I hear what you're saying, and don't disagree. But Steam has become something I dislike enough that I stopped using it years ago. For me, it's GOG, unless I can get the game directly from the publisher.
> It would be the most likely path to actually seeing HL3 released.
The thought of seeing HL3 actually released makes me a little nervous. When I look at great game franchises that had a large time gap before another sequel is released, it seems pretty rare for that sequel not to be terrible.
If Valve is bought by the likes of Microsoft and HL3 is released I’m pretty sure it will be utter garbage. Hunt Down the Freeman is the HL3 we deserve.
Heck, I’m still mad that Microsoft caused DeusEx 2 to be downscaled and dumbed down for the XBox.
I don't think this is a very good take. People tend to see one big company buy another and instantly think it's harmful for the consumer. I think that this is beneficial. Activision feels like a stagnant company that just rehashes old titles and squeezes as much cash out of them as they can. Microsoft buying them provides an opportunity for better management and Microsoft can add their IP to gamepass, which I think could end up a very good product that allows consumers to play a wide selection of games without having to purchase each. This business model is needed in the gaming industry.
Maybe so, but can you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly, and we're trying for something different here.
I don‘t think this will work for gaming. Competition from both new Indie titles and older games will always be there. If prices for newer games in big franchises increase without reason, at some point customers will leave and buy other games.
Yeah, if Microsoft wants to compete, they need to build great game making culture, not just spend lavish amounts of money to acquire all the independent studios out there after the Bethesda acquisition for $8B. Now Activision for $70B. What next?...Nintendo for $150B?.
And using monopolistic profits from other tech businesses like Enterprise software/cloud. And maybe in the future AI profits with OpenAI.
We've had enough of a future controlled by Big Tech. The goal in all cases should be to make them smaller, not more powerful.
Nobody said that it is Sony's fault. The fact remains though, that it is Sony, not Microsoft, for which there are monopoly concerns on the console market.
Given that Sony has an overwhelming lead, it really is not a problem for microsoft to do this acquisition.
I think the overarching concern is giving tech giant like Microsoft a hand when it's already entrenched in consumer, enterprise and government markets.
We don't need to inflate an already bighead corporate oligarch.
The evidence presented at trial showed that this vertical (not horizontal) acquisition would increase competition in the market. If antitrust laws were based on the conception of monopolization you seem to be suggesting then any acquisition or merger would be a monopolist’s act, and that’s ridiculous.
> vertical (not horizontal) acquisition [..] any acquisition or merger would be a monopolist’s act
Past a certain size, it absolutely is. E.g. a food producer will have a much harder time entering (or staying in) a vertically-integrated market (as an independent entity), where all the grocery chains privilege offerings by producers they own.
Using other near-monopolies as argument for why new ones should be allowed to form will lead to a very consolidated market, which is exactly what anti-trust is supposed to prevent.
You’ve moved beyond this specific acquisition and are now talking in generalities. I don’t agree with your post; however, I would note that the situation at issue here in the Microsoft case is actually very similar to your hypothetical. Activision is the food producer. Sony is the grocery chain. Microsoft is also a grocery chain, one that is losing to Sony and is trying to buy Activision in order to compete.
The solution isn’t to sanction Sony because it’s not clear that Sony has done anything illegal to obtain its market position. It’s not illegal to have a monopoly. The solution is to let competition arise from the market and increase consumer choice either by driving down prices or providing more options for consumers. In the market for grocery stores, Microsoft buying Activision is anti-monopolist and pro-competition.
Pay special attention to the theories of harm advanced by the FTC and note that the harm focused on by the FTC is that done to a foreign company (Sony) rather than US consumers.
That is not evidence of your claim. The FTC argues that the deal would reduce competition, and that reduced competition is bad for consumers. To show that the deal would reduce competition, they focused on the impact the deal would have on Microsoft's competitors, i.e., Sony.
Well if we can’t agree that the FTC’s position in this case is blatantly pro-foreign-monopolist at the expense of domestic consumers then I guess we’re sort of at an impasse. You seem to be asking me for a source from the FTC saying that they’re bought and sold by foreign powers. It’s rare to have someone confess to a crime, so you can see how this type of statement from the FTC would be hard to come by (although we can get close: “the FTC announced in March that it would send its own agency officials to aid Europe in implementing and enforcing the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA). When challenged in an April congressional hearing, Kahn defended her position as simply ‘good government.’” per https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/4075612-how-one-us-go...). I’m basing my argument on what the FTC has actually done, regardless of what they have(n’t) said:
Microsoft offered direct evidence of this acquisition being good for US and global consumers (including “willfully” entering into agreements to preserve consumer access to their products via their competitors’ platforms). FTC offered “evidence” that Sony’s monopoly position would be (only slightly) eroded by this acquisition and then hand-waved that this is bad for competition and then hand-waved that this is bad for consumers. Further, the FTC’s own expert (who provided the “evidence” of Sony’s monopoly being eroded) couldn’t even support his chosen inputs/assumptions beyond more hand-waving that amounted to “well that’s what I think would happen.”
So you’ve got a poorly (if at all) supported tertiary-effect on the only people that should actually matter to the FTC (domestic consumers). That’s why the court found that FTC had “not shown a likelihood it will prevail on its claim this particular vertical merger in this specific industry may substantially lessen competition.” The FTC shouldn’t be throwing US consumers under the bus in order to protect a foreign company’s dominant market position, especially with such flimsy evidence. If this was the first or second time this happened with the New FTC? Maybe that’s a coincidence. This many times? Well, that’s enemy action.
Where is your evidence that the FTC’s meritless case is anything other than the FTC working at the behest of a foreign monopolist? Who gains from this FTC action other than Sony?
It's fine that you dislike their argument. The court did, too. That doesn't mean the only explanation is secret, massively illegal payments from Sony to FTC commissioners.
You asked if I had anything to back up my claim that “Lina Khan and the FTC have been brazenly bought and sold by a foreign company and weaponized against US consumers.” I provided my evidence: their actions to date supporting foreign powers and companies at the expense of US companies and consumers.
It’s fine that you dislike my argument or conclusion. That doesn’t mean that my evidence doesn’t back them up.
The FTC has openly stated their going to be more aggressive fighting acquisitions in general to test the limits of the current law, and has pursued other cases as part of that strategy too that aren't "advancing the interests of a foreign company."
You believe Microsoft's claims that this will be good for consumers. I don't. I believe the FTC's claims that "bad for their main competitor" = "bad for consumers." You don't. Fine.
But their actions here are entirely consistent with their stated platform and you haven't provided a shred of evidence that there's any of the behind-the-scenes bullshit you claim.
It certainly harms consumers, so I don't see how the court still approved this especially with the judge's comment against the comparison to Sony. Almost all mergers of this size harm consumers, the fact that it's allowed by default is the crucial issue.
If the FTC still had a spine they would go after all of these kinds of exclusive deals - and not just limited to games.
The film industry was famously broken up such that the production companies couldn't own theaters yet in 2023 that rule (if it still exists) is so weak that most production companies have their streaming service and aggressively pressure theaters into exclusivity Windows.
At the end of the day this only strengthens the trend to PC gaming which only benefits Microsoft and can only hurt Sony. It would only be a minor surprise if Sony joined the Proton/WINE effort with Valve to get around Microsoft exclusives. (Which does help consumers but in a 3D chess kind of way).