Microsoft / Activision deal prevented to protect innovation and choice in gaming
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Having said that, I don't think the deal should go through anyway. Large companies should not be allowed to purchase other large companies within the same market as them.
Personally I disagree. Cloud gaming on Game Pass is a fantastic deal and quite frankly the Xbox's killer feature
I also have a PS5 with the PS+ Premium package, and their cloud offering is even worse.
It's not my internet connection either, as I have my Series X hooked up with an ethernet cable, and my line is a 500/500 fiber line from Bell, with at most 5ms latency. I should be the ideal customer for cloud gaming, and it's still not good.
Playing battle toads, forza, spelunky 2, etc... I'll sometimes get visual artifacting. I even played Wo Ling and it felt as good as playing locally. When I stream, it's in my Galaxy Fold 4 so resolution doesn't matter to me on that size screen.
I also noticed a significant improvement running it on WiFi after I upgraded to a mesh network. I've only tried over cloud a few times, can appreciate connection requirements may very high, but even being able to load it up wirelessly in different parts of the house or backyard is a big plus for me.
That said, the steam deck provides a better gaming experience than a cloud gaming on a phone.
You need to think of Cloud as the mass-market play, and the enthusiasts will want to own a cloud node (Series X) in their own home. The enthusiast console market tends to top out at ~140 million people, very small compared to the number of smartphones out there.
Like is that your phone, with a controller Bluetoothed in - do you get a Bluetooth headset too? Or are you playing sound through the device speaker? Or wired through a headphone jack? Squinting at a tiny little screen in your lap? Or somehow on a stand up closer to your eyes? Do you cast your screen out to an external display or maybe pipe the video out through your charge port? Doesn’t all that murder the battery? I’m guessing you need it plugged in too? And what, you’re on wifi this whole time? Doesn’t using your smart phone as a nexus for all this put it through a wringer?
And at the end of all that, what are you doing - you’re pushing your phone to pretend it’s a gaming console? As compared to just using a low end laptop?
It’s just such an alien concept for me. Why such a tortured process to get to stream a game you don’t even own… when you could just use appropriate hardware and play a better suited game?
Since the processing isn't happening on the phone, it doesn't use much more battery than watching video.
Mobile is the predominant form of playing games these days. The goal is to allow the existing mobile players to access other types of games that won't run well natively on a phone. It's not aiming to convert existing hardcore gamers.
As compared to just using a low end laptop?
Modern phones have better screens and faster CPUs/GPUs than many low end laptops.
I get that gaming like that through a phone would suck compared to a high end gaming pc, but people don’t do that out of preference.
Microsoft, Activision, and most competitors who were against the merger want it to be a thing, though. If the entire industry considers this to be an important future market, the CMA would be foolish to ignore that.
- Residential bandwidth (and to a lesser extent latency) will decrease in the future
- It will be cheaper to have hardware at home than in a datacenter
- Game console manufacturers will prefer designing, manufacturing, and shipping systems vs data center upgrades
- Game companies will prefer allowing end users to own bits vs leasing access a la SaaS
- Game companies will prefer targeting custom console architectures vs standardized data center architectures
None of these seem plausibly likely.
You don't. Cloud gaming is not aimed at those people. People like that, who want to compete at higher levels(that includes me) will not play in cloud competetively. But 99,9% other gamers won't care if the tech gets to sub 100ms delay. That's an insanely big market. You could just run any game you want, without worrying about your PC/console specs, there's huge value in that.
I had a similar experience with GeforceNow and Stadia (40 to 60ms for them as their servers are farther away).
But dropped packets/lag spikes are a real issue. I gave the Stadia trial a shot and never had a play session where I didn't have several instances where the game would start stuttering or straight-up freeze for a few seconds and I'd have to wait until it sorted itself out before I could continue playing. Maybe that's fine if you're playing a turn-based RPG or visual novel, but that's a complete dealbreaker for any game with real-time action (most of them).
And I don't know how you fix that issue without making internet infrastructure 100% perfect and reliable. Good luck with that.
If this really takes off, I'd expect we'd see a further stratification of ISP offerings with QoS guarantees.
Currently, there's little incentive for ISPs to optimize for jitter, and yet they already often market their highest bandwidth offerings as "good for gaming."
- People will need to want to get ripped off
Which doesn't seem plausibly likely.
See: every comment on this article about how XBox's cloud subscription solution is a good value
But:
- Residential broadband quality is stagnating in large parts of the world; theoretical peak speeds keep increasing, but so is overprovisioning, and latency is worsening due to increased reliance on 4G/5G for residential connections, leaving vast demographics incapable of having the required stable, low jitter, high bandwidth connection during the typical "prime entertainment" time slots. Noninteractive media can compensate for that easily, interactive… not so much.
- Externalizing energy and cooling costs to customers can be attractive, especially in high-cost locales like Western Europe. Additionally, space for data centres close to customers is limited, and competition is high. Microsoft has enough synergies with their other cloud offerings to make this feasible as long as demand is low-ish, but if it dramatically increases, they'll have to make tough decisions wrt pricing. And even if it comes out ahead… this is the sort of monopolist advantage that CMA is worried about. Sony etc. don't have this advantage. (Presumably one of the reasons why Sony's current cloud gaming offerings are noticeably worse in quality.)
- Game console manufacturers aren't doing much R&D these days, the machines are standard PCs/tablets with mildly modified off-the-shelf software on top. Customers, meanwhile, are much more likely to be loyal to and seek to justify their invest into the $500 box in the living room, than a service they can subscribe to when a new game comes out, and unsubscribe from at the end of the month when they're done with it.
- Leasing has been the dominant model for 10+ years. Steam and other game launcher do not let their customers own anything, and "subscribe to play the 5 most advertised games" services are highly popular. Cloud gaming is not required for this business model. Indeed, freeing these services from the requirement to own a $500 box would make it easier for users to keep switching to whoever has the best offering currently, which reduces profits.
- See above, game consoles are already highly standardized with little effort needed to port between them. And cloud gaming just adds more platforms, since each vendor will have his own (vendor lock in) optimized image formats/APIs/whatnots.
It's a market, it's going to grow, it's going to look like a segment, not the future of the industry.
Future is here, it's just unevenly distributed.
On the other hand, _Google_ shelving a product is perhaps not as indicative.
Microsoft is actually pretty good at games, has the deep pockets needed to make long-term investments in quality content that Blizzard at least seems to be struggling with atm (not sure about Activision’s other properties).
I don’t follow gaming that closely though, is there some reason this acquisition is a net negative and needs intervention by regulators? Or is this a case of regulators misunderstanding the situation and the market?
The last 2 fallout games I can recall are a phone game and an MMO... And it took people bailing from the company (instead of the company supporting the initiative) to get Outer Worlds, which is the closest thing to Fallout. And then there's Skyrim... It's like MS acquires the intellectual property then goes DLC and/or MMO only.
I don't think many games that I loved for PC survived any acquisition.. at least before Blizzard (so far)
Their lacklustre stewardship of Minecraft notwithstanding.
Let's say the Windows or Internet Explorer days are far behind Microsoft and not relevant to games anyways. Well, remember their lock down attempt on the Xbox One ten years ago? https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2013/06/06/connected/ which was so bad they needed to back down in just two weeks.
Overall, the centralization of the gaming industry is worrisome. Sony in 2021 alone bought six studios including Valkyrie which also should've been blocked. Microsoft bought Zenimax, Nintendo bought Next Level but even Take Two bought up Zynga.
Also, this is a lot of money, even for Microsoft and if times get tough, they will squeeze Activision to get some of that back and creativity will go down.
It's as if someone was saying they were unfair because Disney refuses to release Star Wars to movie theaters. It changed into a bunch of TV shows, it went in a different direction!
This is the second thread I've seen this take and I'm really curious why it's a popular statement. They completely dropped the ball with 343 Studios and Halo. Ruining their own tentpole franchise should ding them a few points. They haven't done much with Minecraft. Apparently games titled 'tell me why' and 'bleeding edge' were published by Microsoft in 2020, the latter being a multiplayer title abandoned 10 months after release. The Goldeneye remake was mediocre. Crackdown 3 took forever and was mediocre. They release so few games I am already in 2019 on their wikipedia page. And this is all after they've spent huge sums of money acquiring studios and publishing rights for games already in development.
They've certainly had some solid releases with games like Psychonauts 2 and the Forza Horizon series, and I'm thankful that their money got us Pentiment. But especially when it comes to the AAA titles you'd expect from a market leader with their own hardware platform, I don't personally see how Microsoft is that good at making games.
TBH, from my armchair expertise I might also agree that this acquisition isn't going to give MS unfair control over the market - but mainly because I don't expect MS could effectively manage Activision.
The only reason I can think is to prevent others from using those services which is anti-competitive and harms the general public.
I'm aware it happens all the time elsewhere.
Platforms buying their content creators to make them exclusives is anti-competitive so I'm glad the CMA has done something, wish they would do it more often.
What I want is a simple regulation which says that if I buy a game, I should be able to run it locally, or on a rented box, whether operated by a third party or not.
but the gist of it remains the same. Microsoft wants to weaken Sony's exclusive moat by buying their own big property to make it an exclusive down the line, thereby either increasing the value proposition of Game Pass, or Xbox cloud gaming anywhere.
by now Microsoft already knows they're not going to catch up to Sony or Nintendo in terms of console sales.
game pass is probably one of the best deals in entertainment though, and by that I mean all forms of entertainment whether sports, film, music etc.
To me this says it's a subsidized loss leader and will get a whole lot crappier once Microsoft has a dominant position.
What's annoying is that GeForce Now could be much better if publishers stopped blocking their games from appearing there under dubious legal pretense: https://www.ign.com/articles/activision-blizzard-pulls-games...
Not to mention making former multi-platform franchises exclusive to their machines just makes everyone who isn’t in their camp hate them.
It’s hit and miss. Some games become big hits. Some flop and they just wasted a few million.
IMHO it’s a better model. More games get created. No one loses out by having a franchise they have played for years denied to them because they own the wrong console.
Though in a 2021 org restructure they were seemingly merged into another first-party Sony studio, Team Asobi[2] who hasn't been credited with anything particularly noteworthy. Just a bunch of tech demos. Not sure what that move was about.
UK is 67 million people, so not as big as USA and EU, but significant enough that in balance it’s not worth the perpetual multi-year headache that Microsoft would have explaining the situation to shareholders if they were not to comply.
A market block wouldn’t have to be all or nothing. Maybe start with the offending products: Activision games, Microsoft’s cloud gaming service, etc.
Big difference in context. I don't know why edited titles like this are allowed
They're not, but there's also a max length at play. The current headline right on the 80 character limit.
If length is longer, you're supposed to condense it as truthfully to the original as possible.
But there are ways to do that not buy leaving out literally the most important word.
They are not concerned about the retail or digitial sales of games. They are concerned about the market share of GamePass and streaming market where after Google left pretty much only MS and Nvidia Geforce remained.
This seems disingenuous. Why not compare to the video game market as a whole? That appears to be currently worth around £8 billion in the UK.
> [...] It was not sufficiently open to providers who might wish to offer versions of games on PC operating systems other than Windows.
But Microsoft Loves Linux! They could not possibly be resorting to Ballmer-era techniques again, couldn't them? /s
Basically, Activision would lease its UK IPs to the newly founded company, maintaining access (with extra steps I imagine, never the less), and Activision UK would technically be a separate entity
It doesn't need to be a conspiracy, there's plenty we should all be wary of with regards to mega mergers. Why is Microsoft so keen on making this happen? They're basically throwing mountains of money to make this happen and it's not out of the goodness of their hearts
Europe is doing is it’s own investigation and is slated to actually approve the merger.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/2/23621989/microsoft-activis...