Xbox wins, FTC loses again
Xbox wins, FTC loses again
www.windowscentral.com FTC loses again, Microsoft is now clear to close the Activision-Xbox deal in the US
Full steam ahead.
109 comments
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"Megacorporation Wins. Consumers lose again. "
Would be the correct title.
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Just curious, could you list tangile points which would lead to a loss for consumers?
The only thing I can think of is MSFT becoming evil and making everything shit and super expensive, in which case talent would leave to create new studios and customers would move to competitors where they would get a better deal. This is possible because in this industry any game can become a top seller (Vampire Survivors, Stardew Valley, BattleBit for e.g.) and there are competitors like Tencent, Sony, Nintendo, Rockstar, all succeeding without ABK games.
Here are some of the pros I can think of:
Getting access to ABK games under a subscription services gives cheaper access to games as long as the subscription fee is less than $70/quarter, assuming avg gamer buys CoD every year to play for 3 months. And when it becomes more expensive than that, avg gamer would simply buy the games like they currently do.
CoD on GeForce now for next 10 years makes cloud gaming more lucrative, and competitive given how poor xCloud is compared to GeForce Now.
Having CoD on Sony platforms for at least next 10 years leaves enough time for Sony to invest in first party shooters, something they had ignored for so long.
Xbox getting content and quality parity for CoD acts as a equilizer for all gamers, something which Sony was blocking so far with exclusivity contracts.
Microsoft getting some leverage over monopoly of App Store and Play Store to push for lower commisions or alternate stores on respective mobile OSes makes it better for all mobile devs by bringing competition.
AB games coming to steam also sounds like something PC gamers would like.
Microsoft potentially clearing the toxic culture at ABK and allowing unionisation only makes it a much safer and equal working place. It may not lead to high quality best seller games, but I guess ABK can benefit from lack of toxicity at cost of lack of profits.
Update: those who are downvoting, please do share your thoughts. I'm happy to learn more and update my perspective on this.
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MSFT becoming evil
You are nearly 40 years late.
As someone who's been a Blizzard customer for 30 years roughly. Selling to Activision was a bad move from a customer perspective. Selling all that to Microsoft is utter bobbins. I 100% think Microsoft games division is currently less horrible than Bobby Kotik. It's a real; real low bar. But I know for a fact that as a customer I'd be much more satisfied if Blizzard was independent again and able to develop at their own pace and schedule. And not that of some distant detached greedy CEO focused on quarterly profits, and what they can cancel in the short term to boost them.
Also I have this controversial statement. There should be no locked down consoles or console exclusives for the last 20 years or so. They've all been one of 3 more or less common PC microarchitectures. Intel, PPC, and ARM. Hell before that they were largely Z80 or 6502 based. Those at least ran bare metal with fairly specialized configurations and timings. All the modern stuff largely runs on otherwise largely common commodity hardware with well-known APIs and back ends. Just artificially locked down.
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Hey Mister! Guess what?! You aren't wrong. And I agree. Carry on.
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Bummer. This is terrible news for consumers and is really going to hurt competition. Microsoft has already shown that they're going as exclusive as possible with their recent acquisitions, so we can probably expect to never see any new Activision/Blizzard titles outside of Microsoft's ecosystem now, and that's a huge umbrella of content that the rest of players are going to miss out on.
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Not necessarily.
The FTC did important work here even if it wasn't successful in the suit.
Microsoft got Zenimax and was then rather excessive in how they handled it, and that is a large part of what prompted this degree of pushback by regulatory bodies.
If Xbox wants to leave the door open for future acquisitions they are very much aware they need to tread carefully moving forward.
Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if some of the Zenimax titles end up as timed exclusives down the road rather than permanent exclusives as announced.
Similarly, Sony has set any of their own future acquisitions up for potential scrutiny if they continue down the path of total exclusively, and what's likely going to end up happening is each side plays their bargaining chips to end up with mutual releases after timed windows.
This is arguably better than Activision Blizzard ending up in the hands of Tencent and going even further in the direction of Diablo Immortal, and may even help curb future exclusivity across the industry.
(In general, first party studio ownership leads to better games and less microtransaction BS.)
Less exclusivity in the future may largely rest on the FTC and other regulatory bodies having aggressively pushed back on this here and now.
In trade regulation you don't need to necessarily win the fight to still have a net positive influence.
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Microsoft got Zenimax and was then rather excessive in how they handled it, and that is a large part of what prompted this degree of pushback by regulatory bodies.
If Xbox wants to leave the door open for future acquisitions they are very much aware they need to tread carefully moving forward.
This reads like a rather optimistic take to me.
What Microsoft learned here is that they can buy a publisher (Bethesda), make that publisher's games exclusive, and still get the biggest gaming acquisition in history approved by regulators.
Microsoft will likely pause acquisitions for a bit, but everyone else that wants to get into/stay in gaming is going to look into them even more than before. I'd be surprised if Sony doesn't end up buying someone decently large (but not as large as Activision: Sony cannot afford anything like that). Everyone seems to think Sony would go for Square Enix but I think they would make a different choice.
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Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the Zenimax titles end up as timed exclusives down the road rather than permanent exclusives as announced.
Yeah, I really hope this is how things play out with that acquisition. I'd really love to be able to play Elder Scrolls 6 (some day), but don't want to be forced into a separate $500 purchase in order to play it.
Similarly, Sony has set any of their own future acquisitions up for potential scrutiny if they continue down the path of total exclusively, and what’s likely going to end up happening is each side plays their bargaining chips to end up with mutual releases after timed windows.
Yeah, this is a concern I've had with Sony acquiring Bungie. Although, Bungie's new game, Marathon, is already slated to be cross platform, so the fact that they're not immediately going into exclusivity-mode is a good look, so far. Hopefully we see a similar pattern with their other new IP, Matter, whenever they share more about that.
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Yeah. When IBM started getting wary of antitrust in the 80s, that paved the way for Microsoft, and when Microsoft started getting wary of antitrust in the 90s, that paved the way for Google. The FTC may be toothless, but the more it sucks up a corporation's time and resources and just makes things difficult, the more it serves it's purpose regardless.
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I don't know what to think about this acquisition. What I do know is that the FTC should pick their battles in a different way. There are at least a couple of other tech companies (Google, Amazon) that should be broken up because they're monopolies and I don't know why nobody at the FTC seems to be looking at them.
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They have been picking their battles.
Breaking an existing company up into multiple smaller companies is an order of magnitude more difficult for a US regulator than stopping a company from buying another one. The FTC is running face first into a legal system that has methodically chipped away at anti trust law for generations. That's the obstacle here, not picking the wrong battles.
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They have been picking their battles.
Poorly. Very poorly. Under Khan they've been an absolute shitshow of mismanagement.
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Big corporation gobbling up even more of the market is NEVER good for anyone but the corporation and it's shareholders.
Not for the consumers. Not for the gobbled. Just for the gobblee.
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The FTC is actually looking at Google
The Department of Justice (DOJ) also recently filed an anti-trust lawsuit against Google in particular.
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The only people on the planet who give a shit about this within the provided context of gaming are Sony fanboys.
If people actually gave a shit about megacorporation problems and the FTC, they would be pissed the FTC took this bullshit case as an excuse to pretend to do things while Walmart and Amazon destroy every grocery chain and many other goods markets.
Within the context of gaming, Activision might be one of the 3 gaming companies worse than Microsoft. Microsoft owning them might actually improve their products and reduce their microtransactions.
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I don't have a current PlayStation or Xbox. I give a shit about this. Because frankly you're just plain wrong. Two things can be wrong and deserve to be addressed. Just because people are upset about one doesn't mean they aren't upset about the other. The FTC should be tackling both. But they are purposefully hobbled by the opposition.
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Press a massive X to doubt on reduction of micro transactions. See halo infinite on that front.
The reason I personally don’t want this as someone who does not own a PlayStation or a Nintendo console and likely never will is this leads to a future where Microsoft builds up enough IP where suddenly everything is locked into Microsoft game pass and their own store and windows that anyone wanting to use a different platform may as well just fuck off.
It’s the first step on the road to anti consumer practices that Microsoft has historically always done.
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The only people on the planet who give a shit about this within the provided context of gaming are Sony fanboys.
I've owned every Xbox since the OG Xbox and my first thought about the deal was "that shouldn't be allowed".
It is inexcusable to let a trillion dollar profitable corporation purchase any other profitable corporation. If activision sucks the government should do it's job and investigate them and break them up, not give Microsoft more economic power and less incentive to compete. Good luck getting AB games on whoever tries to launch the next console, if they even bother trying knowing the current hegemony of the gaming landscape.
Microsoft isn't some magic unicorn unqiuely capable of running Activision not like a shit bag and no company should be as big as they already are. It's a hamfisted solution at best to give them control of AB, and one that doesn't actually address or dicentivize future shitty corporate behaviour.
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There's one family taking over all the auto dealers in my area.I just started working for them and now if I decide to leave, I feel that I'm screwed if I have to find a job elsewhere in my area and my choices will be low. Microsoft taking over everything is not just bad for consumers, but it's bad for people that work in those industry.
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Who are you trying to respond to? I never said Microsoft was good?
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As someone that has somehow played a lot of FPS over the years and amazingly not spent a dime nor a single minute on Call of Duty games, I’m mostly bemused at this whole thing.
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Exactly. The games are already microtransactioned and stuck in all different kinds of exclusive deals. These people are just upset it goes against them now.
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I still have mixed feelings about this, but I never doubted it would go through.
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Why do you have mixed feelings? Has massive industry consolidation ever benefitted the customers in the long run?
The US hasn't shown much interest in breaking up big companies in the past two decades. Once this is done, it practically can't be undone.
Microsoft is more powerful than most world governments. And it keeps expanding and growing.
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Sony’s, not Microsoft’s, AAA dominance is bad for the video game industry. Video games are a somewhat unique medium in that smaller development houses can and do compete with the megacorps. I’d rather Sony have healthy direct competition over them eating up even more market share.
Competition between Sony and Microsoft with Nintendo also having their own parallel strategy is good and better than the alternative, imo.
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109 comments