UK Blocks Microsoft’s $69B Activision Deal
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35711913
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/microsoft-activision-deal...
The argument is always 'but we don't have a monopoly in this artificially small sector X', however I don't think that argument is the one we should be looking at when the companies involved are $1trillion+.
Can we prove exact consumer harm in each case? No. However, I think most people can accept that there's a risk to consumers, markets, and democracy if companies become too big.
Edit. Seeing a lot of comments saying UK couldn't function without Microsoft which kind of supports my point.
More importantly, they're becoming complacent and lazy, using their legal and financial clout to kill competition, not product improvements.
This is why China is so scary - their companies have started being very competitive to US behemoths which have been buying/killing their competition for decade(s) now.
When it comes to tech regulation the Chinese authorities have at least a 2-3 year advantage against the US/UK, notice how the likes of Alibaba and Tencent have been brought (relatively) down compared to what was expected of them 5 years ago.
So they're forced to compete on price, quality and features (to some extent - it's not like they're not getting daddy Xis helping hand). Just like companies in other healthy capitalist markets which haven't completely broke due to consolidation.
China has been accused multiple times of assisting their companies with absurd amounts of government subsidies (leading to at least Europe and the US enacting counter tariffs), as well as using government and private industrial espionage and hacking campaigns to clone Western products.
China - Awful way of treating people, illusion of democracy, but at least they reign in huge companies.
US - Democracy but companies wield huge power. Doesn't seem to care about people's health much.
Many European countries - Huge focus on caring about public healthcare, companies under control but innovation stifled a lot of times
Same goes for basically every country, and it's important to be able to see the good and bad at the same time, to have a bit perspective. No country is 100% good, nor is any country 100% bad.
As such, it isn’t me or people thinking like me that you should fear (i.e. people who quote Chateaubriand to a total techie stranger on the web), you should fear the “quintessential” French (or Westerner, in today’s age) that goes “where the power is” by instinct (on this La Boetie was right centuries ago). That is if you people really care about your freedom.
Nothing is 100% sure, anyway, and the CCP does these things in secret to provide it deniability.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/04/tycoon-xiao-ji...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/china-billi...
Even is something is an accident, gross negligence is still a thing and may be criminal depending on the consequences of said negligence.
see the book Technological Slavery by Dr. Skrbina
You can argue that they're leveraging M365 and their enterprise contracts to out-innovate smaller competitors like Slack, Notion, etc. Yeah, ok; I don't love it. But I really can't help but feel: At least they're doing it. At least they're releasing new products that don't totally suck. I literally can't think of one thing Google has released in the past five years that left a fingerprint on the world. Facebook is a similar story. Apple is a very different company, but its not dissimilar: M1 was incredible, but if you put that aside (because, really, the past three years has been "M1 Catchup" for them) the iPhone is the same thing it was four years ago, the iPad is the same, the Watch is the same, the software is overwhelmingly the same, I guess they have a new Savings Account (when companies start running out of ideas to innovate, they turn to financial engineering).
Microsoft is a cool company, and I'll die on that hill. I'm not happy with everything they do. I think the entire Windows division leadership needs to be gutted and replaced, and they need to think long and hard about what Windows looks like for the next 10 years (and maybe they're already doing that!). But putting that aside, even considering Microsoft's very light anti-competitiveness, I'd take them over the rest of big tech nowadays. They're mostly just lame ducks.
[1] https://k8s.devstats.cncf.io/d/9/companies-table?orgId=1&var...
> Microsoft is a cool company, and I'll die on that hill.
"cool" companies stagnate. Remember, Microsoft was that "cool" company who left us with rottin IE6 until competition came.
So let me channel Ballmer, leader of said cool company: COMPETITION, COMPETITION, COMPETITION, COMPETITION, COMPETITION, COMPETITION. That makes our world better.
I think the reason Windows is getting crappier is the same reason that Microsoft is doing everything else in your list - they're transitioning to an SaaS/services company and leveraging their existing strengths/monopolies to elbow their way into various SaaS markets (see: Microsoft Teams shipping "free" with O365). Changing windows to respect users again would require changing the whole corporate culture you are praising, not just the Windows division. In my opinion what's happening to Windows is entirely consistent with everything else Microsoft is doing, not some aberration.
Windows will be around for at least a few more decades until everything is a web app. But leadership under Nadella knows the clock is ticking and that's why they've moved their focus to making Office 365 (Office/OneDrive/Teams) and Azure their bread and butter.
I really feel actually that Google is the outlier here in underperforming their innovation quota. It seems to me they hired a bunch of high level managers who somehow got envy of Ballmer-era Microsoft and tried to re-invent it at Google. I can't understand how or why this seems like a good strategy but it's all I can make of the fact that have withdrawn from every innovative product they were interested in.
Comments about the quality of the offerings aside, what do these applications objectively bring to the table that merits calling them innovative?
We shouldn’t expect them to have similar margins.
The gross margins on those segments are completely different - twice as large for services.
Microsoft reports three segments with roughly the same size and similar margins.
Microsoft is almost entirely a software company.
The xbox 360 had such terrible heat dissipation problems that it got it's own moniker 'the red ring of death'.
In the old days their HID device devision was solid, and was doing some interesting things. Back in the 90s-00s their keyboards and mice were pretty much best in class (if you wanted a membrane keyboard), the natural keyboard was a big step forward in ergonomics. On the gaming side they had solid mid range flight sticks that the rest of the industry lacked (it was either crazy high end or literal trash). Hell they even tried some coolish experimental devices that were at least interesting .. Specifically I'm thinking of the Sidewinder Strategic Commander. A kind of one handed keyboard that was sitting on top of a two axis sliding mechanism.
In the 2010s they did some interesting devices (or branded some) like the kinect and the original surface tables (the ones that looked like cocktail style arcade machines)... and they started moving into compute devices like the 'second gen' surface branded tablets/convertables/laptops. Those seem less successful overall. I don't see too many enterprises giving people surfacebooks instead of lenovos...
MS have definitely had some failures and weirdnesses (and a few straight up "should never have happened" issues like the RROD), but that's part of innovation.
In the real world the technology industry does tend to have higher margins than other industries. There might be perfectly normal explanations for that, such as network effects, but there are also government policies that have the effect of reducing competition. For instance, intellectual property laws reduce competition in order to attempt to encourage innovation. The strawman version of capitalism doesn't exist in the real world. Margins can remain high for some time.
That being said, there are competitors for Microsoft's bread and butter products. If you want an alternative to Windows, try Linux. If you want an alternative to Office, try Open Office. For many users, however, they get a better experience with the Microsoft products than these alternatives, even though they are free. Microsoft has to keep making their products better than the alternatives or people will use others (though there are costs of switching and network effects that mean that MS probably doesn't need to have the absolute best product on the market in order for customers to keep using them).
Unless you go out of your way to buy cheap laptops the difference between macbooks and your favorite dell business longitude isn't as bad as you think.
Your argument is not that different from people who say things like "we don't have perfect competition, that is a market failure, the government must fix it". As I said before, perfect competition is a model. It isn't some utopian ideal. The argument as I phrase it is basically the Nirvana fallacy, and I don't think I'm mischaracterizing your views.
I would be more sympathetic to arguments like: "anti-competitive corporate behavior, like the formation of monopolies or cartels or other means that reduce output and raises prices, is not socially optimal. The government should prevent such behavior"
In other words, I think you adopt a position that tries to prove too much. This merger may be bad (or it may be good, I don't really know), but you don't have to rely on the argument that if competition isn't perfect then the government should step in in order to oppose it. That's not a good argument.
How are any of those things relevant for the comparability of the businesses of Apple and Microsoft anyway?
Apple's gross margin is about 40% because the marginal cost of hardware is somewhat expensive. Software companies typically gave gross margins of 65% or more, because the marginal cost of software is zero.
This is an odd take.
The first big player in a space e.g. Atlassian just acquires any competition and guts it. Sure, that's as free market as it gets (ignoring anti-trust?) but I don't see the benefit to the consumer.
Or, at the other end, as a Canadian, UK taxpayer (and many others) your money goes to keep afloat gov't subsidized startups that could never compete in the free market otherwise... is this beneficial as well?
I just write ANSI C so maybe it's all lost on me somewhere.
Did Atlassian “gut” Trello or Bitbucket? I was using both before Atlassian acquired them and don’t fully understand what you’re talking about.
Can you elaborate a bit more about your theory？
On the other hand, Exxon Mobil has an operating margin of nearly 20% despite selling an undifferentiated commodity in a market with many well-capitalized competitors. (They are not the only one: ConocoPhillips also sports an operating margin in the range of 20%.)
The particulars of a market often drive margins more than does the competition.
Also note that the oil companies I mentioned have higher margins than Comcast, and they operate businesses that are also capital intensive with lots of plant and equipment. They operate in more competitive markets than Comcast, and yet they have higher operating margins. Different markets produce different results.
I think what we need is more nuanced regulation to give smaller competitors room to compete with big tech products, if this were the case then who cares about their size or acquisitions? So long as smaller competitors can always rise and challenge the big players then size is fine since it would just correlate to quality and value, rather than an ability and willingness to crush competition.
The question to be asking is if a practise is unduly restricting competition. Having a market share of 95% is fine in my eyes so long as there is competition.
Sure, they did sign on their games with services like Geforce Now for 10 years and bring Call of Duty to Nintendo consoles. However, these all seem like short-term theatre to make everything look nice.
First of all, the reason why Microsoft games were not on Geforce Now was because Microsoft PULLED them from it [1]. And considering that Activision-Blizzard is (allegedly) worth $69 billion, I don't believe that they couldn't bring their games onto Nintendo platforms if they saw a market there. Seems like Microsoft is just making up imaginary markets to be able to say "look at all these people who will get Call of Duty because of US".
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/20/21228792/nvidia-geforce-n...
In fact, I think their size makes them uniquely incapable of innovation. All they can do is push everyone down to stay on top.
Whether or not it is a large group of employees or a small group of employees doing the innovating is a separate matter, but the need for huge cash flows is there (if my assertion is correct).
Too Big to Fail should be recast as Too Big to Exist
That said, I think this indirectly feeds off your core point - this 'new direction' of the FTC is almost certainly because these companies have become far too 'influential' owing to their size and power. I think one could even generalize a simple test: "Would the immediate collapse of this company meaningfully imperil the US economy, security, or other significant interests?" If so, that company needs to be split up until the answer is no.
[1] - https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
And if you did break them up, it wouldn't solve the problem at all. Whatever company is in charge of Windows is still going to be critical no matter the size. It depends on the importance of the software product in the tech industry, not the size of the company like it does in banking.
How nice would it be if all the features that you get from the windows/O365/Onedrive synergy were available to any cloud competitor? So I could pair word/excel sync with my own self-hosted cloud. I could back up all my files using the native tools to any cloud provider. That’s the sort of benefit you could theoretically have by breaking up Microsoft.
> I think most people can accept that there's a risk to consumers, markets, and democracy if companies become too big.
I don't think that's true at all. If you want to make an argument that companies are too big, you need some exact logic to support it.
The only solid arguments I'm aware of are specifically regarding banks because of their systemic impact on the economy -- the become "too big to fail" and thereby become a moral hazard situation. Although given the efficiencies of large banks, the solution has become to regulate them more tightly to prevent moral hazards, not to break them up.
But the idea that tech companies are too big doesn't have the same kind of logic behind it, and your assertion that they "snuff out entire startup sectors" doesn't seem to be supported by any evidence. To the contrary, they invest in entire startup sectors and competing top tech companies buy competing startups to supercharge them. Competition is thriving as the big tech firms compete with each other.
In the modern era of Big Tech, consumers seem to be doing great, markets seem to be doing great, and Big Tech's size is probably not even in the top 50 threats to democracy. The effects of social media is surely in the top 5 threats to democracy, but that has nothing whatsoever to do with the size of the company that owns a social network.
It's well known that oligopolies are bad for efficient pricing, just like with (though not as extreme as) monopolies.
That's why EU competition law rightly focuses on "significant market power", rather than US competition law which cares little unless there is a literal monopoly. (Currently, the UK retains EU competition law).
Thriving competition wouldn't result in super profits year on year.
It's not a zero sum game right now. The moment FAANGs are in a zero sum game trying to cannibalize each others' market shares I predict HN won't even have an argument around if tech firms are too big. That means tech has plateaued and has become a mature business like Coca cola or Kroger.
All of them tried, competition was hot, the market picked a winner.
But what's next is a market distortion. Google uses their front page to push Chrome over Firefox, Apple doesn't care to make any of their other devices (e.g. Watch, HomePod) interoperate with other platforms, Microsoft packs Windows with ads for Office 365, OneDrive, and so on. All of Big Tech is perpetually obsessed with owning platforms as opposed to products, because once you control a platform, it gives you the leverage/"moat" to continue profiting without the corresponding investment into competing fairly. Thriving competition would be to have to compete independently in each market, rather than winning one and then extending that win to other markets by tilting the playing field.
Activision Blizzard falls nicely into this category as it's explicitly designed to gain an edge over Sony in gaming. Cloud gaming or not, it's clear to everyone that the general idea is improve the standing of Xbox products and Windows PCs by using the leverage of CoD as an existing market winner. As opposed to making the platform compete on its own terms. That's a market distortion.
The fact that large companies put large amounts of resources into startups and developing new markets doesn't mean that they compete fairly, or that it's a better outcome for society/consumers than an alternative reality where each product by itself would compete on its own merits, and companies could win markets independently rather than having to sell to existing market leaders for extra leverage.
In game development specifically there's a line of successful studios that were devoured and their game franchises destroyed or made creatively poorer.
The owners likely saw it as a better deal financially. Sad but usually true.
I like the idea of "meat" and "milk" startups, like cow breeds; "meat" companies are created to grow fast and be sold (and usually butchered), and "milk" companies are kept more stable and independent, to fulfill their purpose, not (just) in hopes of a purely financial gain.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/07/emails-detail-am...
Similar stories exist for every single of the big tech companies.
"Snuffing entire sectors" is unlikely, even though buying and shutting down a potentially viable competitor is not uncommon in the business world. Google in particular bought and eventually closed a number of startups, but, to my mind, it was mostly because they did not happen to be fast enough growing, not to kill competition. There is some research [2] showing that companies do buy other companies to kill a competitor, but this is very far from being the majority of cases.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic#Honduras
[2]: https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/do-companies-buy-comp...
I want some of that stuff you are smoking.
Vendor lock-in. Planned obsolescence. Common, established features being removed in favor of proprietary protocols or connectors. Data privacy violations.
All of that because we like free/cheap stuff. Saying Big Tech is good to consumers is like saying Big Pharma is good because their opiods are chemically pure.
This is a HackerNews Arm Chair Quarterbacking Stretch, but I think a really positive move for Microsoft would be to spin-off Xbox into a separate company. I can't imagine the division is all that profitable; its grown to confer practically zero positive network effects for Microsoft's other businesses. Culturally its got to be the weirdest thing Microsoft does nowadays. This AB deal likely single-handedly increases the valuation of the division by, jeeze, 50%? Maybe more.
In the 1980s, for instance, MTV really showed music videos. It got bought by old fogey Sumner Redstone who decided unilaterally that we couldn't see music videos anymore -- funny now that we have YouTube it's been discovered that people want to watch music videos when they can. (A bit of destruction like Musk buying Twitter?)
If you buy a game you are voting with your dollar, if you subscribe they're going to make an Assassin's Creed game this year, and next year, and the year after that, and the year after that. The game industry is going to make whatever games it wants to make, and Microsoft will pay them, and I guess people will play them because they don't have a choice. We saw that with cable, since they get paid whether or not you watch, they can skimp on quality and collect increasing payments year after year. The movie and TV industry has been driven mad by streaming because suddenly performance matters... Disney is completely capable of producing a product that upholds it's brand but why do it when you can get $7 a month from every cable subscriber for ESPN whether or not they watch sports?
You can rail about cable all you want, but some of the best shows of the last few decades were on cable. Breaking bad, mad men, the shield. Greatly expanding the choices allowed for networks to take risks in attempts to gain a small but I yerested audience, rather than having to appeal to the entire general public, and what we got was amazing.
If I have to pay $20 to try out some indie title, I might put it off a long time until it's on sale or never try it. If it's already included in a subscription I pay for, I might try it early or right after hearing some buzz about it. More people jumping in on that buzz can create a wave of enthusiasm that greatly increases the reach of the game that wouldn't happen if a similar number of sales trickled in over an extended period, which might increase players (and possibly sales on other platforms) more than otherwise.
It's been noted many times in the past, some of the big breaks for indie studios were when they got accepted into these programs or ones like it.
My understanding is for non-exceptional games (like, not Fortnite-scale), they just provide a flat fee with a fixed-length contract. Your studio gets $X and it will be on GamePass for Y months. I'm sure gameplay stats are taken into account for future contract renewals or for other games with the same studio, but no, I don't think there is any kind of explicit revenue sharing going on. It can be a hard decision for studios, since they have to balance lost income from sales against the guaranteed income and added publicity from being on GamePass.
Source: Stuff I remember from podcasts, mostly Brandon Sheffield on Insert Credit. Sorry, I know that's not a great reference =/
As an avid world of warcraft player, the community as a whole has been hoping the merger goes through for exactly this reason. Activision has seemingly forced through a lot of bad changes over the years to try wring out as much money as they can.
like the Mojang --> Microsoft --> XBox fiasco
Whether that is how things usually turn out in practice with these sorts of acquisitions is a question I don't have a good answer to.
Or is the idea that MS would just dump a lot of money on them? Do they have a track record of that?
"I want this product to be better"
The reason we don't want companies to gain market power (the feared result of mega-conglomeration) is because it allows companies to charge more for the same or a worse product.
If this person believes that Blizzard being acquired by microsoft will result in a better product, then they expect the net benefits to outweigh the negatives of Microsoft's increased market power over the video games market.
Acquisitions that produce a consumer-surplus should be most welcome!
There used to be a much bigger moat to assemble a platform that could play cutting edge games. Now PC game engines/graphics drivers are getting so good the console SDKs aren't such a big boon and the hardware is basically just CotS.
Then on top of that they built an ecosystem of toys and software to monetize their adoring customers.
Nintendo recognized the deadend of the hardware race in the early 2000s, and continued developing their "mascots" while Sony and MS abandoned theirs. I don't think Microsoft and Sony have the DNA to pull of something like this. They are still software and hardware companies respectively.
I'm not sure I'd give them much credit on this, since MS/Xbox hasn't achieved much at all in the gaming industry over recent years. Maybe there's not much egregious evil there a-la Activision's leadership scandals, but the track record is not great.
As a gaming industry consumer who's been playing Microsoft consoles and games my entire life, MS has recently:
- Ruined the Halo franchise
- Stymied the current console gen with the Series S' weak memory capabilities
- Acquired multiple beloved studios and released little to nothing over 5+ years, with their highest profile release being Starfield, the game Bethesda was already developing when MS bought them and made it a platform exclusive
- Edit: Forgot trying to turn the Xbox One into an always-online TV set-top box
Spinning off Xbox might be a good idea, if it's MS' senior leadership that keeps hamstringing their success. Because if the Activision acquisition proceeded like their previous studio acquisitions, we would see one or two Activision games release in the next decade, along with maybe a mediocre COD TV show.
But the 360 was unveiled in 2005 and was replaced in the market a decade ago. My criticisms are really oriented to the last 5-10 years. On that note, I'm reminded of the Xbox One "your game console is for watching TV and will always be connected to the internet" release. And in that generation, it was the clamoring market and Sony's response (like the classic 'how to share secondhand games' video[0]) that pushed Microsoft to stop acting unreasonably.
people call this a terrible idea, i thought it was a great fucking idea. At the time, and frankly still, streaming apps are mostly what we use tvs for these days, and the platforms to run them that are shipped INSIDE of the tvs we buy fucking suck, uniformly.
While the xbox was built as a gaming console initially all they really wanted to do was expand that notion. It could be an everything box for your '10 ft experience' It could play games, and be a dvr, and be a streaming interface, and and and. They could easily spin out another sku with lower specs to curtail some of the gaming power and make a more streaming focused box (like an apple tv but by microsoft) and sell that to the parents while selling the beefy gaming one to the kids.
I think the thing that sunk it was some Orwellian notion about the kinect. It's awesome tech, get a siri/alexa plus body tracking. The biggest downside being that MS's stance on privacy is 'peasants get no privacy'. At the time siri/alexa were still in their early stages and people were creeped out by them. Siri with eyes was extra repellent.
Well that and gamers throwing a fit because they didn't want their gaming console to be useful to their parents and other non gamers ...
Microsoft seems to have given up on the living room entirely outside of gaming ambitions.
I think it's worth revisiting the announcement. Gamers were upset because the launch presentation of the new console spent very little time talking about games. That presentation was followed by a Q&A with the notorious "we have a console for people without reliable internet, it's the xbox 360" quip. The "peasants get no privacy" attitude really felt like it was just part of a bigger "the peasants will buy what we say" attitude.
I'm with you on the utility of the basic concept. I actually really enjoyed using the Kinect to control Netflix. There was a good concept buried in the xbone vision that I would still like to use today - but Microsoft fumbled the execution tremendously badly and in particular, did so in a way that did not show "good stewardship to gaming."
On that note, the Kinect almost ended Rare as a studio...and the cool media features introduced with the Xbox One are now as dead as the Kinect.
Is there anything like it available on the market new in box today? I recall the RealSense cameras seemed comparable but those are gone now.
Golly. I still do miss being about to navigate Netflix titles by just swiping my hand in either direction. That really felt like the future made real and now it’s been discontinued for years.
The DVR stuff wasn't a big issue for anyone, but it was emblematic of the fact that Microsoft didn't give a shit about gaming. Sony was already pulling ahead with exclusives people wanted by the end of the previous generation, and all Microsoft had to show for the next generation was a home entertainment system that had too much DRM and focused on their motion control gimmick at the point where everyone knew it was a fad that came and went in 2006 with the Wii. And on top of all this it was an extra $100 on top of the PS4's price.
Saying gamers were mad because the system could be useful to their parents is incredibly disingenuous.
Microsoft is making the right moves here slowly shifting away from hardware (no profit) into software in the gaming space, but it's going to take some more time to do so.
Potentially it makes more sense to drop xcloud (huge black hole for the next ~10 years), to adhere to CMA's claims of them dominating the cloud gaming space, so they can continue with Game Pass (the part that actually matters for Xbox).
How many times have you seen I do most of my stuff on Linux but I still boot in to windows for games. An independent xbox would be less likely to use Windows for their OS.
No, it's not. It does the exact same shit that Activision does except it targets an even younger more vulnerable demographic. Did you forget about this? https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2022/12/245-milli...
Maybe if your only comparison is Activision and EA. When you consider all the dark patterns Fortnite employs to encourage logging playtime and making purchases, they're only separated from those others by degrees. Stacked up against developers that largely avoid those patterns (FromSoft, Nintendo, CDPR, etc), Epic is most certainly closer to the "bad" side of the spectrum.
[0] The online has micro-transactions but even if it didn't exist, the single player experience is well worth the money alone and is on par with all the others.
Where, exactly, did you read "gold standard"? No one said that. No one hinted to that. The words stated were "great company" and "one of the good ones".
>Epic is also a great company, but beyond those two when it comes to major developers/publishers there's far more bad than good
I listed all major developers, many of which are owned by mega publishers like Sony.
Team Cherry and concernedape are also extremely amazing and ethical developers. But they aren't peers to the companies we're talking about. Its easy to be ethical when you're small. Its laudable to maintain a sense of those ethics when you're large, even if the absolute measure isn't a perfect score.
Nintendo is far scummier than you let on; they're among the scummiest video game companies on the planet. It just doesn't come through in their fantastic and "pure" gaming experiences; but the fights their legal team chooses to engage in are ugly, despicable, and very unique among gaming companies.
Team Cherry produced a great game. I wouldn't be willing to call them a good company or a good team; their track record shows as plainly as you could possibly wish that they are terrible at developing games.
But at the same time I think there's something cool about being able to hop in without shelling out $60. And getting updates and new content for years.
From the FTC blog post:
>The FTC alleges that with millions of consumers’ credit cards conveniently in hand, Epic failed to adequately explain its billing practices to customers and designed its interface in ways that led to unauthorized charges. You’ll want to read the complaint for details, but here are a few of the dark patterns the company allegedly used.
>According to the complaint, Epic set up its payment system so that it saved by default the credit card that was associated with the account. That meant that kids could buy V-Bucks – the virtual currency necessary to make in-game purchases – with the simple press of a button. No separate cardholder consent was required.
Scum. Glad Apple booted them from the App Store and the courts sided with Apple.
With how quickly tech changes and the risks involved, companies have to find multiple revenue streams if they want to survive. Pretty much every startup dream is to one day become a huge company.
only like $5 billion in annual revenue, doubt they'll want to let that go for no reason.
Even if this were true, there is no guarantee that the acquiring culture will actually be imposed on the acquired. In fact it's often the opposite, with the acquired "infecting" the parent company - particularly when the acquired comes with a large headcount.
It should be to break it into smaller pieces so that consumers have the flexibility to avoid the more toxic segments of the company and the market can decide whether their bad behavior matters or not.
The one company I have in depth knowledge of going through an acquisition tried to drive employees away where possible, and fire others, down to a skeleton crew of overworked disgruntled employees because it makes them look REALLY good in the short term for being acquired.
If you couldn't count on acquisitions by larger companies being approved easily, the only other way to game companies can generate profit is by maintaining current games (at least to being playable, without terrible reviews from bugs), and /or develop new games...
Screw those guys...
Imo I want competition and choice as a consumer. This basically sets things up so that consoles become a non competitive market because Xbox lacks exclusives that Sony has.
The replies advocating for Microsoft to strong-arm a country into submission are chilling.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onavo
Onavo vpn
The Xbox Series X/S has been a bit of a boondoggle and Sony is vastly outselling Microsoft this generation. Not to mention the existence of Nintendo, Valve and other PC gaming stores. The argument that this would weaken competition for gaming consoles is laughable.
Sony and Nintendo have exclusive games to gain an advantage. Now an American company wants to do the same thing, and they are blocked.
American companies are being put at a competitive disadvantage due to ridiculous anti-trust interpretations. Basically the CMA and FTC are trying to prevent any American tech company from acquiring another tech company for political points at home. How did we get to this point?
It is extremely dangerous to throw logic out the window, as this results in bureaucrats picking winners and losers.
Yup.
The NHS (UK National Health Service) is Microsoft's biggest single account for Office/Office365 and probably other stuff too.
So I guess add on other parts of UK gov and yeah, "couldn't function without Microsoft" is not far from the truth.
I mean, some might argue that the UK government hasn't functioned much since 2016/Brexit anyway, but that's another story. :)
At least FB doesn't promote stupid challenges that send people to the hospital with cracked skulls like TikTok.
Why? Cz there's $$$ to be had in the fallout for said govt and other competing big corps. And then the next govt follows suit and voila - a super reaction chain !
Activision-Blizzard was in total corporate chaos before the deal was announced, the CEO (Bobby Kotick) was accused of permitting workplace sexual harassment and employees at the company were on the verge of mutiny. They were also seen as a stagnant publisher that only cared about its billion dollar franchises (Call of Duty and Candy Crush) while letting its other IPs like StarCraft and World of Warcraft rot and turning the beloved Diablo into a cash-grab pay-to-win mobile game. The Microsoft acquisition would have likely breathed some new life into the company and allowed corporate to clean up shop. This will probably lead to Activision-Blizzard continuing on its previous, doomed trajectory that it was on back in 2021.
Two big bag companies, but surprising Microsoft is the better one.
The concern is not who can develop the existing IPs the best or if Activision/Blizzard will continue to exist. The concern is that Microsoft already has a strong position, and consolidating it further will make it even harder than it is for new entrants to have any chance.
> “Microsoft already enjoys a powerful position and head start over other competitors in cloud gaming and this deal would strengthen that advantage giving it the ability to undermine new and innovative competitors,” Martin Coleman, chair of the independent panel of experts conducting this investigation, said.
If you're still up for playing devil's advocate, come up with an argument against that this acquisition wouldn't consolidate anything in Microsoft's favor, and as a result lead to fewer consumer choices.
Microsoft's strong current position in Cloud Gaming isn't because XCloud is devouring all the competition, its because the competition barely exists in the first place. Google and Amazon left their cloud gaming products to rot and GeForce now is very janky (but still quite popular from what I've heard!). Google and Amazon's mismanagement of their products doesn't automatically make XCloud into an aggressive anti-competitive monopoly, especially when you consider the fact that Microsoft inked a 10-year deal with Nintendo's cloud gaming provider to provide Call of Duty to the platform last month.
Key takeaways:
> In relation to console gaming services, we found that Xbox (Microsoft) and PlayStation (Sony) compete closely with each other, and that Activision’s Call of Duty (CoD) is important to the competitive offering of each. The evidence suggests, however, that Microsoft would not find it financially beneficial to make CoD exclusive to Xbox after the Merger. We also found that making CoD available on Xbox on better terms than on PlayStation would not materially harm PlayStation’s ability to compete. On this basis, we found that the Merger would not substantially reduce competition in console gaming services in the UK.
> In relation to cloud gaming services, we found that Microsoft already has a strong position. It owns a popular gaming platform (Xbox and a large portfolio of games), the leading PC operating system (Windows), and a global cloud computing infrastructure (Azure and Xbox Cloud Gaming), giving it important advantages in running a cloud gaming service. With an estimated 60-70% market share in global cloud gaming services, it is already much stronger than its rivals.
> We found that the Merger would make Microsoft even stronger and substantially reduce competition in this market.
According to the people who done this research (CMA), they seem to say MS already have a 60-70% marketshare, and making that higher via a acquisition, will make it harder for others to enter the market.
CMA of course cannot make competition to step up, but they can try to stop incumbents from becoming monopolies, which is what's happening here.
1. Gamers don't want cloud gaming. Latency matters. Cloud gaming is at best an addon for when you can't use your console.
2. Xbox is the least popular gaming platform. If things keep going the way they are I would not be surprised if Microsoft got rid of Xbox before the next console cycle.
3. Windows being the leading operating system has no impact on the gaming industry
This honestly reeks of an analysis done by outsiders that don't actually understand the industry. On the other hand, this consolidation also sucks to see.
In the case of consoles, their own argument is that no, the market hold would not grow stronger.
In the case of cloud gaming, their argument is that Microsoft already have a strong hold on the market (in the UK) and the acquisition would likely lead to a stronger hold.
Xbox as a console and Windows as a OS and nothing to do with the case they're making.
> This honestly reeks of an analysis done by outsiders that don't actually understand the industry. On the other hand, this consolidation also sucks to see.
Yes, because they are not experts in the gaming industry, they are experts in the industry of businesses in general, and monopolies.
Same could be said about your own argument, it reeks of an analysis done by someone who have no grasp on wider markets and monopolies, but happens to have knowledge about gaming to some degree.
I guess what we disagree on is that conclusion. "Cloud gaming" is not a real market. It's a subsection of the larger gaming market, it will never grow much bigger than it currently is, and by the reports own admission it would be against Microsoft's interests go for anti competitive moves. Unless there's some miscommunication around what "cloud gaming" is, I don't see how their justification makes sense.
On the other hand, while this aquisition might not strengthen the console market, it would go a long way in preventing Microsoft from exiting the market. If Microsoft exits the market that will be a huge blow to gaming, and I would hope regulators can see that.
Picture this feedback loop:
- Microsoft has 20% market share
- Microsoft buys company Y, bringing them up to 35%
- Microsoft ruins company Y's product with their awful leadership
- Microsoft now has 21% market share
It's ridiculous that a company with this many talented people, and this much treasured IP, is languishing in this state and tied up with such easy-to-avoid internal-only mistakes.
> The Microsoft acquisition would have likely breathed some new life into the company and allowed corporate to clean up shop
Maybe. But it seems more likely that Microsoft would have cleaned up leadership a tiny bit and then left Activision-Blizzard to slowly quietly rot away, in much the same way that Microsoft has treated Halo.
There's a substantial portion of the tech startup sphere whose entire goals are: get big enough to get acquired and get a big bag from the sale. It kind of runs counter to current sentiment around here.
It's why they are languishing. It's the "resource curse". On the contrary, It's one of the reasons why Microsoft is a killer machine. They are disciplined and focused. That kind of discipline stifles away creativity (like Skype and yammer).
Microsoft has shown some resolve when it comes to supporting games in spaces that aren't absolute gold mines, specifically in the Real Time Strategy (RTS) genre. They are publishers of Age of Empires, which all things considered is a drop in the bucket when revenue wise, yet it still is allowed to exist. Blizzard (via Activision) mostly exploits or kills all of it's "less-than" products, which increasingly is almost everything when compared to the behemoths like Call of Duty and Candy Crush.
It was probably a bit of wishful thinking, but some of us were actually excited that Microsoft would get access to some of the games that don't get supported very well while the customer base is literally holding their wallets out asking to pay to support the game. For example, Heroes of the Storm does have a dedicated following and we're ready to pay $10/mo or something similar to help support the game, but it's literally spent the last three years patching after every time it runs because it's broken. It still plays fine, but it eats gigabytes per month of bandwidth all because nobody cares enough to modify an XML file or something.
The same is true of Diablo II: Resurrected. It's a great game, but we can't pay for extra stash tabs which in the ARPG genre is kind of the go-to monetization strategy these days. Everyone would be fine paying $5 for a few stash tabs and it would be a good way to support ongoing development and maybe pave the way to getting the long awaited "Act 6" content everyone would love or even just allow the team to spend a bit more time adding more end-game meta content.
That's a good counter-example. Forza Horizon 5 was released to much acclaim in terms of the actual game, but the release was plagued with terrible microtransaction problems that overshadowed it and caused the player base to revolt.
But I wouldn't think this changes the opinion on any antitrust violation concerns.
If a company has problems, especially cultural issues, it should fix them or die.
Bethesda's acquisition is extremely demoralizing due to this. I hope Starfield succeeds as it's my most anticipated game of all time.
The acquisition of Bethesda doesn't help Microsoft's case of horizontal integration or even their future intentions with cloud gaming with the potential integration of their existing Xbox game pass service even if they acquired Activision-Blizzard.
Seems like the UK regulators decision in that regard was the wise decision and it was the right one.
Here are some links about the worker unrest at ABK prior to acquisition announcement:
Activision Blizzard worker organization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activision_Blizzard_worker_org...
Activision Blizzard employees stage open-ended strike and union drive: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/12/activision-blizzard-w...
Its noteworthy that the employee strikes mostly stopped after the acquisition was announced - seems they believed like I do that Microsoft would have cleaned things up.
-
Basically this, the cost for a AAA game at ~$69.99 is just fucking ridiculous.
In practice, however, many games fail to break out of super basic gameplay loops. I usually prefer cheaper indie games where I have more fun.
That's the difference. Those games were $70 because the ROM chips nintendo forced you to use were basically unavailable at sufficient quantities. Playstation games were cheaper despite being able to use literally 10x the amount of assets.
The only people forcing AAA studios to add a billion polygons to every stick are themselves. They haven't tried anything different, so of course they think it's the only option. Meanwhile billions of dollars a year go to people who spent $10 on an asset in the unity store to back up a game that actually is interesting.
Actually, even worse, they often AREN'T wasting millions on assets. Grand Turismo 7 has plenty of cars that are just copy/pasted from the previous release.
Compare that to today.
>Microsoft received 721 employee complaints of discrimination and harassment in the U.S. between 2019 and 2021, and Microsoft investigators found most allegations to be "unsubstantiated".
Excluding the 2022-23 complaints, I'm just wondering which company do you think is under more "chaos" and on the verge of "mutiny" right now?
The gaming landscape already looks like a barren desert. More consolidation will lead to more desert like features.
I don't know why this happens but it seems to occur again and again in gaming with indie studios that get acquired.
The tools are so bloated and arcane compared to the can-do approach.
Also agile messes up productivity alot due to its inflexible and process heavy nature.
The sort of issues around engineering and linked-lists[1] in the original StarCraft wouldn't really be an issue today. Teams are operating in a very different way.
[1] https://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/tough-times-on-the-road-to-...
* The bureaucracy drives away the types of misfit maniacs that build incredible and unique products.
* You're left with people more worried about fucking up then they are about building something awesome.
* Google is still mostly search
* Amazon is still mostly an online store (small exception with AWS, but that was charcoal[0])
* Meta is still mostly facebook (unique products were acquired)
etc.
0 - https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digita...
What? I would express the opposite of this sentiment. Amazon is mostly AWS. Their online store's profit pales in comparison to AWS.
https://www.fool.com/investing/2022/07/07/aws-chief-says-ama...
> Amazon overall generated $24.8 billion in operating profits in 2021, and AWS was responsible for $18.5 billion (or 74%) of it. Basically, a business segment that contributes 14% of overall revenue is generating roughly three-quarters of Amazon's total operating profits.
https://s2.q4cdn.com/299287126/files/doc_financials/annual/2...
It was developed by a small independent team within Blizzard who iterated like crazy and created prototypes with Adobe Flash. At one point they transferred basically the entire team to work on finishing StarCraft 2 temporarily and left the two principal game designers to continue iterating for 10 months.
Hearthstone ended up being a smash hit and their first properly new game since they released World of Warcraft. All because they gave a small creative team the freedom to explore those ideas.
A single character model can have more polygons then a whole game back in the day. The textures are also way more detailed, animations are more fluid/realistic, etc.
This is why a lot of effort is being put into helping developers to make content faster with things like automatically generating large parts of levels/worlds (basically a developer puts in the important parts manually and some system fills in the rest) and automatically generating and animating humanoid models (MetaHuman), etc.
For example here is nice video about using MetaHuman with basically just a phone for face capture as input https://youtu.be/pnaKyc3mQVk?t=72
UE5 procedural generation stuff https://youtu.be/akIqVM0gh4w?t=435
I mean… if this is the case, how did Vampire Survivors become a huge hit and win multiple game of the year awards, and result in countless clones?
Even if we have brain-interface full immersion virtual reality, you can still have fun throwing cards into a hat. In fact you will prefer it.
Games are like food rather than cars. In food, high quality food doesn't really push out low quality food. Even a billionaire will want a grilled cheese sandwich sometime. While in cars, you can say that in general people would like the more expensive cars rather than cheaper ones.
To me this puts a hard limit on upside of quality for games. It doesn't matter how many thousands of hours of dialogue you have voiced and motion captured if a vampire survivors could always eat your lunch.
This is very different to something like Call of Duty, Diablo, The Last of Us, etc where you put a lot more money into the game and if you actually make a good game (and fund a large marketing budget) it will most likely sell well. Same recipe works for Disney and other large movie studios.
Basically if you went to watch the next Marvel movie and you were greeted with $50 000 budged indie movie special effects and the no big name cast it gets you would you be a satisfied customer? (and you were expecting Marvel movie special effects and big star actors)
And something like Call of Duty makes more money every month then Vampire Survivors has made in the ~1 year it has existed.
This is nonsense. Very few gamers actually care about how many polygons make up each tree and that some texture in the background is 10mb compressed. Meanwhile the actual product of video games from AAA companies has stagnated immensely. You can make your game ugly as sin, and if it's actually fun, people will love it. Every indie darling is an explicit disproving of this claim. We have Minecraft, factorio, cruelty squad which is entirely built around being horrible to look at but fun to play, an entire genre of "old" looking games that don't actually look old. There's even an entire world of games that look good with assets that you can buy on an open market for a few dollars each.
A decision which has made them a metric shit-ton of money. Why would they stop when they've found a winning formula? And why would Microsoft decide to stop such an easy revenue stream? Sure the Diablo name is being dragged through the mud (among a particular demographic, at least) but the consequences for that are years or even decades away. If anything, "cleaning up shop" might mean shutting down the less profitable divisions - something Blizzard has been actively doing anyway.
> This will probably lead to Activision-Blizzard continuing on its previous, doomed trajectory that it was on back in 2021.
Maybe their trajectory is doomed when measured in decades. Right now they're printing cash. I think they're happy to abandon their legacy "core" audience in exchange for the gacha whales that will pay them multiples more for a cheaper-to-make experience.
I realize that a lot of us grew up with Blizzard games, I myself have all the CE boxes they shipped since Warcraft III. But the people who made those experiences are generally long gone. A change of ownership is unlikely to radically change priorities or bring back the magic.
Mobile gaming industry sucks so much, D:I is actually a good product there. It offers so much more than your regular ad-infested crap with "recharge energy" mechanics at the very least. It might be the worst compared to what is available on PC/consoles, but those are different audiences. For the more informed consumers Blizzard has Diablo 4, where they seem to restrain greed to somewhat acceptable levels.
Yes they've fumbled with their PR back then, might've made one of the worst presentations in industry history (look at Bethesda & Fallout Shelter and see it being masterfully done) and generally been incompetent in a few of their recent titles (W3: Reforged and OW2 comes first into mind), still, looking at it today, Diablo as a franchise looks like a right step than otherwise.
This is irrelevant to the committee’s decision. The question is if the merger is too anti competitive.
Every anti-trust regulator in the world would have auto-blocked the merger after 5 minutes of examining the situation. Unfortunately actual anti-trust enforcement seems to have fallen entirely out of fashion.
Instead, they might move development away from the UK. Bad for developers, sure.
Maybe not at the beginning because home video games were new and different, and there was plenty of competition from Sega and Atari and others.
But in a related note, Atari was forced to create a new company to publish some of its coin-op games to fend off monopoly accusations. (It later turned out to just be a shell game.)
You may want to think a little longer on that ;)
(As in, we're still talking about a games market and not an OS market. OP doesn't have to rethink their claim that MS is "non-existent on pc" because they practically are.)
W11 is utter trash (as I type this from W11 PC and when I mouse over to the left, it pulls up ads ... how can I block this at my router? anyone know the domains it pulls from. I need a blacklist of all MS ad domains.
Also, here was something that just happened this morning ;; I opened my machine, and I clicked on the firefox menu icon, and it fucking opened microsoft EDGE. It HIJACKED the firefox icon.
I had to reboot... and it added a fucking "search bing" thing to my menu bar... WHAT THE FUCK. I didnt set this up.
Why is W11 making ANY changes to my machine autonomously????????
What's the share of PC gaming on Microsoft Windows vs. not on Microsoft Windows?
Written on my Mac Studio.
And when looking at the top 20 most played games on Steam, there's some pretty big titles missing. PUBG (5th most played) is borked, CoD MWII (6th) is borked, Destiny 2 (9th) is borked, Rainbow Six Siege (10th) is borked, FIFA 23 (11th) is borked, NARAKA: BLADEPOINT (13th) is silver, Rust (14th) is bronze and Dead by Daylight (20th) is bronze. So when it comes to "most players", there's definitely a lot of gaps too.
I have a Steam Deck and I can have pretty good gaming experiences on it. Surprisingly even. But it's definitely not perfect, and one of the reasons why I can feel pretty confident in owning a Steam Deck is that I still have a Windows-based gaming PC that I can fall back on.
Hmmmmmmmm........
I can't speak for the UK, but in the US, there are plenty of industries where the creator of a product is not also allowed to be the distributor of the product.
Movie companies aren't allowed to own theaters. In most states, auto makers aren't allowed to own dealerships. Beer companies aren't allowed to own bars. The list goes on.
Cloud gaming? Really? Seems a bit tone deaf. Is the CMA known for not understanding the markets they regulate?
Nowadays Stadia is dead, Xcloud is kind of usable under the condition you use a controller (which makes it a non-started for pretty much any non first-person game) and pay for Game Pass. Geforce Now is still going strong, has much better and stable quality and is the gold standard.
How does any large company build into a new/growing market without having a "huge advantage"? Do they have to wait until the market is matured from smaller companies before they can get into that market?
Consider dota 2 -- it's a service entirely on the cloud continuously updated.
The list goes on with in terms of aaa games offered by either company where the main offering is actually multiplayer.
Nonetheless, my point was that cloud gaming is probably the least concerning part of the merger.
Not so sure about this. Stadia was an odd service - even google's own devices (new google tv for example) didn't support stadia. You had to pay for subscription + a whole game price in most cases.
Combine that with the fact that people already made peace with stadia being shutdown before it even launched - who wants to pay money for a game that can disappear any day.
I had Stadia and played from time to time. I know people who used Stadia exclusively. I play xCloud all the time on my iPad... Stadia had a market, just it being from Google killed it. Well, publishers also played their role there - they wanted consumers to buy games again instead of just giving them access to steam.
Shadow, GeForce Now and Amazon Luna are still alive.
Timed exclusives are not an unfair advantage, both Sony and MS have bought or paid for timed (or perpetual) exclusive games for their platforms.
Are we going to make a rule that bans all exclusive games, and force developers to create ports for all system that launch on the same day?
I don't think just because the two biggest actors can afford to pay for exclusivity that means that paying for exclusivity is fair. Would you expect itch.io to pay for exclusivity in order to compete in the games market?
> Are we going to make a rule that bans all exclusive games, and force developers to create ports for all system that launch on the same day?
If you made a rule about this, it would be about banning paying for exclusivity. If a developer wants to make a game exclusive to the PS5 that's up to them, but Sony can't pay them for the privilege.
All the console makers are already massive publishers with many in-house studios, perhaps there should be restrictions on publishers from owning developers. But there would also need to be a restriction on console makers from owning publishers and developers as well, but perhaps some small allowance for first party devs?
E.g. the platform owner also owns all content production to stuff its channel with content.
In the short term this can be good for gamers (as long as the platform owner throws absurd amounts of money around for content production in order to grow the subscription base), but I can't see this being good for the long run, especially when there are only two or three big players on the market, and no more independent game developers and publishers are left (Activision/Blizzard isn't exactly a fountain of creativity of course, so that's a bad example).
It works Just Fine(tm) (with fiber internet) but guess what's missing: a lot of AAA titles.
So yes, there's a problem with cloud gaming.
Not sure if it's mine or theirs though. I don't have a gaming PC right now, only a PS5. Since we're speaking of ActiBlizzard, i maybe would try Diablo 4 if it were available on GeForce Now. But it isn't and I won't.
Incidentally, I doubt there will be a console Diablo 4 for the PS5 either. They were too far into the acquisition process to not dump non Microsoft platforms.
I'm not sure what you mean by there being a hold up. I assumed the deal was dependent on the ABK deal going through, which the CMA just blocked and they've all but guaranteed that GeForce Now won't get Call of Duty.
I don't know if i even want to try playing that with a controller, but maybe... just maybe. Depending on how predatory the game proves to be after 6 months of updates.
https://www.gov.uk/cma-cases/mobile-browsers-and-cloud-gamin...
They intended to investigate the cloud/mobile gaming and App Stores, plus look at mobile browser competition (or lack their of on iOS).
Sadly Apple, clearly feeling threatened by it, forced it to be stopped on a fairly stupid technicality. Hopefully they will be able to relaunch it soon.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/apple-wins-appeal-against...
If this decision re Microsoft+Activision is anything to go by, the wider investigation and potential regulation coming from it could have been very impactful.
More so, the merger is also discussed in the EU in general, which is a bigger market than just the UK alone, and if the acquisition gets blocked in the UK, EU watchdog will surely use that block as prior material for doing a EU-wide block.
Hence Microsoft is lobbying both the UK itself and Europe wide for making the acquisition go through.
Of course, even if the acquisition gets blocked everywhere but in the US, the US counter-part can still be acquired, but not sure how much sense that would make, they'll probably end up not going through with it at all in that case.
Might make sense if their EU/UK offices were mostly admin.
So if the acquisition gets blocked in the EU, they'll miss out on a ton of revenue, for sure.
Not to mention the operational overhead of actually operating the machinery when the machinery is banned in the EU but not the US.
https://steamdb.info/app/252490/
39.99 in the US, 22-23 dollars in China and India. In indonesia the game sold for as little as 13 cents a license. It is slightly higher in the EU and UK but by very little. In this case 24% of all players are American. The UK is 2%. So even with a slightly higher price, they're not getting anywhere close to the revenue that US consumers are generating. Russia has 10% of the player population and the game sells for 13 dollars. I don't think the population correlates to revenue when the game in nearly every market is going to see for less, or attract much less players.
(in billion U.S. dollars)
- Asia Pacific - 87.9
- North America - 48.4
- Europe - 32.9
- Latin America - 8.4
- Middle East & Africa - 6.8
Edit: found the numbers here https://investor.activision.com/news-releases/news-release-d...
Americas: 1,211
Europe and Middle East: 742
Asia Pacific: 381
Total: 2,334
So Asia is 16%.
But is this actually the case with Activision? Aren’t most of their games banned in China (this shrinking the Asian audience massively) and don’t they charge a lot less?
(Microsoft has a really interesting history of UK game development teams, going way back, including ones they ultimately shut down such as Lionhead.)
> Why did we review this merger?
> 28. The CMA’s primary duty is to seek to promote competition for the benefit of consumers. It has a duty to investigate mergers that could raise competition concerns in the UK, provided it has jurisdiction to do so.
> 29. Microsoft announced in January 2022 that it had agreed to acquire Activision for a purchase price of USD 68.7 billion. The Merger was conditional on receiving merger control clearance from several global competition agencies, including the CMA.
> 30. While both Microsoft and Activision are US-based entities, the question for the CMA is whether the Merger may have an impact on competition in the UK. This link to the UK can be established based on the turnover of the business being acquired in the UK (ie whether the UK turnover of that business is more than £70 million). In this case, we concluded that the CMA had jurisdiction to review this Merger because Activision met that threshold in FY2021.
You can read the full case here: https://www.gov.uk/cma-cases/microsoft-slash-activision-bliz... Microsoft and Activision/Blizzard decided themselves to seek the approval of the CMA.
The CMA's final decision is a 418 pages-long report. I doubt any of the commenters here have read it before throwing in their opinion about the case or the decision.
The real issue is tying computers to software. Computers and software need to be considered two markets. Computers are a utility, whereas software is sometimes a utility. But by tying software and computers, these tying companies use their software to be anticompetitive in the hardware market. That is, any software which does not run on an untied hardware system is anticompetitive even if it has procompetitive effects. All this is to say that we need the Open App Markets Act to pass.
(This is all ignoring the OS market and the hardware and software tying that exists in it, which is more difficult to discus, but in my opinion system calls are anticompetitive as well by nature with the exception of a theoretical standardized set of system calls.)
Are you really saying that Microsoft can't exert undue influence on all other games and software studios to unfairly compete in the gaming segment... even though they would be controlling the operating system developed on and targetted to... let alone their extensive cloud and console providings that they could simply deny to the competition?
In such a landscape, indie devs would be powerless.
I was looking for a better word than "utility" but couldn't think of one. What I mean is that games are unimportant. Grain is a "utility" for me as are computers ect. And I don't think it matters what Anti-competition bodies are "designed" to regulated as I am already giving my own opinion on what I think they should do so for me this isn't a such an important point.
>even though they would be controlling the operating system developed on and targetted to...
That is the issue exactly, which was my whole point. It's an issue irrespective of whether they have 1% or 99% of the video game market. They are the hardware/syscall railraod by which developers ship their software oil. But large marketshare alone is not an issue, and can be assured to be a non issue with something like the Open App Markets Act whereas in something like grain or computers it is almost impossible to show whether a dominant company has used their monopoly to hurt competition. If we just give some basic rules as to allowing users to decide how to use their computers we won't need to care about how large any video game company is.
This is true, but the laws around this don't only apply to utilities. In fact, they don't fully apply there at all (but I'll circle back to that).
As a big example, look at movie production companies and theater chains. Way back when, lots of the most popular chains were owned by production companies. So if you wanted to see certain movies, they were only available at the theaters owned by the companies that produced the film.
Sounds a lot like what we've seen in video games for years now, where lots of AAA games are exclusive on Xbox, Playstation, Nintendo (biggest example), or PC. And let's not forget MacOS and even Linux. Pretty much only the roughly equivalent spread of so many platforms has forced the big publishers to largely do multi-platform releases of popular titles. Let Microsoft own Activision-Blizzard and we could be seeing lots of existing titles and new ones be PC and Xbox only.
In regards to the big utilities, the last major one of those to be broken up was AT&T in the 80's. But beyond that, most of the major utilities can't really be "broken up" because of what they do. Power generation, water, and sewage. Those all require shared public infrastructure for the most part. Because of that, small pure commercial enterprises aren't possible. But for the most part the companies that provide those services are still commercial entities, but they have a few extra layers of government oversight that notionally should be monitoring them for good governance and civic oversight. Sadly we see where that falls apart like in Flint, MI.
Only didn't mention trash/recycling pickup because that's a lot more flexible. Much easier to have competing services, although in places like SF we only have Recology.
I am glad that this deal has been blocked. In fact Microsoft is already too big. It shows in their products.
It makes perfect sense. These huge companies have a lot of unused capital, which they have to find productive uses for. Acquisitions in markets they already have competencies in are a rather obvious way to make use of it.
Internal R&D and launching new products is the best use of this capital (as it’s the most tax efficient), but it’s difficult to infinitely scale that spending efficiently (but acquisitions can effectively be one way of scaling this over the long term).
The alternative is dividends, or the much more tax efficient stock buy back. But long term, acquisitions are better for shareholders.
You don't need to buy Activision for that to happen. Netflix hasn't bought Universal or MGM. They purchase the rights to offer movies on their platform and at the same time produce their own content via their own production. Also Netflix doesn't own the hardware. That makes it very different to Microsoft, who own the hardware, the platform which you speak of (game pass) and also wants to own the production companies. This stinks of anti-competitive behaviour from miles if you ask me and is nothing like Netflix.
The video game space has always been about exclusives. Nintendo publishes no where else. Sony just started to publish on PC for some games. What is the difference?
I think Blizzard infamously refused to release their games on any other online distribution platform besides their in-house battle.net launcher. Don't know how it is with other Activision titles, but the only way to get Diablo 4 in MS library of games is apparently to buy the whole company.
I'm also not a fan of this deal, but I think this is a good question worth an answer. I think you'd need to suggest exactly what practices they may want to implement.
For example it's not hard to see why they would continue to want to put COD on PlayStation systems: that brings in a ton of money. You can imagine a world where yanking it helps Xbox, but I don't think that's an inevitable result; would they really want to give up $X Billion in revenue from PlayStation if that only brings in $Y Million in new Xbox sales? Obviously it all depends on the numbers, but it's an example of why they can still benefit from this transaction without implementing anti-competitive practices.
>"[Microsoft] submits that Microsoft has strong incentives to continue making ZeniMax games available for rival consoles (and their related storefronts)."
2023/01: Hi-Fi Rush is exclusive to Xbox and Microsoft Windows.
2023/05: Redfall is exclusive to Xbox and Microsoft Windows.
2023/09: Starfield is exclusive to Xbox and Microsoft Windows.
So yeah, I'm gonna err on the side of "they'd probably restrict a lot of games afterwards". Maybe some big existing properties like Call of Duty might be available, much like Minecraft, but I don't foresee Microsoft-ABK being a win for competition.
No it doesn’t since Microsoft is doing just that with Bethesda. The Minecraft acquisition was at a time when MS had no good will and needed to earn some, plus it’s a lot of children playing that who can’t be bullied into buying another platform. This is not the case with future releases on games that basically every adult who plays games takes part in.
As you say, Activision is the worst of the worst and the MS deal was a chance to change this.
You think Activision is going to ditch the terrible leadership and change on its own? haha
The argument for why Microsoft would make things better is that we can look how great Microsoft has been handling similar gaming acquisitions, like Minecraft.
Your "argument" though seems to be repeat back someone else statement while saying "Nuh uhh!".
Do have an actual original thought here, as for why you think Microsoft would make things worse, when the evidence we have shows otherwise?
Or is the extent of your argument "Nuh Uhh!" And "I said the opposite of what you just said!"
It would highly likely lead to the downfall of MS (in the EU/ europe anyway) with the UK putting massive amount of money behind a version linux. ie look at what google did to linux for the mobile phones! and remember what apple did to unix? .It would also allow the EU to kick MS massively - Germany has been trying to go for linux for some time
even the US is trying to block this merger https://www.eurogamer.net/ftc-suing-to-block-microsofts-69bn...
The whole Gamepass thing also appears functional to me (i.e. I know people who pay money for it and are satisfied, unlike former Stadia).
But I strongly believe that stopping consolidation in that market is a laudable move and am super happy with the decision to block this.
Vivendi has gone through so many mergers, acquisitions and divestitures over the years that I find it hard to imagine them having a sentimental attachment to a particular business unit.
Blizzard has pretty much always just been one part of a larger organization. It was sold in the 90s.
Anything below 120 feels sluggish to me. At 60 fps local, I move my mouse and the picture is changed after what feels like an eternity. Can't imagine cloud rendered 60 being better. In fact, it's guaranteed to be worse.
This has weird effects. Each player is actually playing in a slightly different world. You might see yourself hitting something and they might see themselves blocking the shot, and only one of you can be right. The different worlds will retroactively correct themselves to be consistent in some form or another (depending on the game it might be that the person shooting is always correct, or it might be that the person blocking is always correct, or it might be that whoever's packets reached the server first is correct, or really some complex combination of all of the above). The weird effects are worthwhile because people are really sensitive to latency in response to their inputs.
Even in slow placed games that use simpler networking models, I'm pretty sure the UI is basically always local. For example you might press the button that says "do the thing" and see the button style into it's "pressed state", but the server decides that the thing doer is dead before that button press reaches the server, so it ignores that button press.
Read carefully gpm's comment, or, I don't know, start playing games? It really helps
Not saying reported is unequal to actual on that system, just pointing out the reality, a cloud gaming vendor is saying “this is out latency”
[1]: https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/27/tech/zuckerberg-contempt-cana...
Not to mention that the only part of distribution this can affect is the physical one. I mean, if I want to sell a game on Steam and sell it in all the regions Steam operates in, I can do so without needing a business presence in every individual country...
How can they overreach ?
But unless they do, the UK has the right to regulate its own market in the way that they see fit, irrespective of whether that impacts on other markets (modulo international trade agreements).
But in this case, you have two US businesses, that own local UK business and do business on UK soil with UK customers. That is why they fall also under jurisdiction of UK.
MS and Activison could close their business in UK, and stop serving their customers and then they would not be affected by UK courts.
Bottom line is, if you do business in multiple places, you need to play by the rules of all that places.
It's similar how the legislation in lets say California can affect products in all the USA.
if the companies' activities affect competition in the UK then the CMA is responsible.
the hint is in the name: Competition and Markets Authority
Why would Microsoft listen or care about the ruling? It’s because they operate in the UK. The CMA can’t just regulate companies that don’t operate in the UK.
For reference, both Activision Blizzard and Microsoft have very significant presence outside of the US.
SEA Ltd had great promise in 2021 - they made a hyper popular game and used those revenues and user mindshare to branch out into ecomerce, financial services and all sorts. It was seem as an important part to cradle snatch Gen A before they signed up to meta and amazon.
With metaverse ideas also peaking it seemed like a must do strategy for every conglomerate to get into games. Amazon did too!
In 2022, SEA and Meta are not healthy. Thier plan to invest heavily and get paid later does not make sense in a higher rate environment where the payoff is less than you'd make saving your money in bonds.
Microsoft has a long term interest in games, but it doesn't need to supercharge it. There are better uses for the 70 billion.
As we see with the HBO Max/Discovery merger, once companies merge, they have the option to close or end projects, that is destructive to both consumers and the creators of those.
Furthermore, these are trillion dollar companies, that are almost getting if not already way past the size of "Too Big To Fail". These companies need to be reigned in, if we are trying to create mobility in the private sector, as well as consumer choice, and avoid monopolization currently already in tech.
Putting MS in charge might have saved Blizzard from Activision. Maybe they'd have brought WoW to Xbox, or done something new with the Starcraft IP. Perhaps even a new Blizzard MMO...
It's annoying that so many great Nintendo games are only available for Switch, and I can't run them at 4k/60fps+ on PC or higher-end console. But that's just how things are. And at the end of they day, they're unimportant entertainment products, we're not talking about monopolies/oligopolies controlling something important.
You technically can via emulation, though how legal that is depends on the laws where you are I guess.
On the other hand, as a Mac gamer, maybe it wouldn't be so great? Blizzard have been great at Mac support, with all their titles - except Overwatch - being available on Mac since day 1. But Microsoft hardly releases anything for Mac now days.
I'd be surprised, merger or not, if they ever release any of their new AAA titles on Mac again.
And between the move to Metal as a graphics API and the transition away from Intel CPUs, porting PC games to Mac seems like it'd be rather more of a pain these days.
Some of Blizzard’s titles (World of Warcraft, Hearthstone) were already ported to be M1-native. But even the older titles that haven’t been ported (StarCraft 2, Heroes of the Storm, etc) run great despite being emulated. In fact, they run much faster and smoother on my M1 Mac than they ever did on my Intel Macs!!
You’re right, though, that Apple’s attachment to Metal and lack of built-in support for industry standard APIs like Vulkan is an issue (although a 3rd-party Vulkan implementation is available).
And that's on a base M1 macbook Air with the 7C GPU setup. Although it does have a fan rigged up underneath my laptop stand. Every other Apple Silicon Mac has even more gpu oomph.
Friends with M1/M2 Pro machines are plenty happy with their GPU performance but most of them all just play WoW. One with a M1 Max Studio is enjoying plenty of performance at 4K.
I have a similar setup (except 8 core) and with the mod I don’t feel any need for an external fan for gaming.
Perhaps because small studios start with ready-made game engines that are already ported to Metal?
Leaving out your deep pocketed customers seems like a pretty dumb move to me.
Maybe they'll get Sony sorted out too at some point.
However, I don't believe that tto be the bigger issue. Let's look at this from a bigger perspective: Microsoft is much bigger than Sony. The western world is very much dependent on this giant. Should it have even more power?
When you look at the numbers there is just no way to make the conclusion that Sony are "just as bad" when it come to aquisitions.
I am however absolutely in favor of Sony getting blocked, should they for instance plan to acquire EA, Ubisoft, Rockstar etc.
I miss the good old days when everything was on Steam. I wish there was some middle ground between everyone paying 30% to Valve and running 10 launchers at once. And now, with subscription models making their way in, it even more closely resembles the development of Netflix. There should be an industry standard launcher, just as there should be an industry standard cloud gaming standard. As it is now, only one of them is really usable with reasonable latency where I live, and it lacks a lot of games because NVIDIA refused to put their foot down on "we just provide a computer, not a platform".
This competition is parallel worlds that pretend their competitors do not exist and where customer choice doesn't exist (unless you're really not picky about what to play).
Well, this is 1 step further from everything being on gamepass
Activision, maker of the hit game Call of Duty, said the ruling “contradicts the ambitions of the UK to become an attractive country to build technology businesses”. It labelled the decision a “disservice to UK citizens, who face increasingly dire economic prospects”, adding: “the UK is clearly closed for business.”
What a petulant response.
1. Xbox Live/Game Pass is still a better service, and one of the best deals in gaming.
2. Microsoft already owns (or has owned in the past) tons of gaming IP. Halo, Minecraft, and Bethesda are huge names. Microsoft Game Studios was used to publish some fantastic games in the past.
3. Cloud streaming is largely theoretical at this point. There's potential, but will customers choose a $20-40/mo subscription instead of buying a ~$500 console every ~5 years. I'm doubtful. The math says it's a bad deal for console gamers and worse performance for the top 1% of the market. Sony's lead here probably isn't the killing blow for Xbox.
4. Microsoft could always make it's own games, instead of acquiring them.
5. Microsoft has some benefits with owning both platforms Xbox and Windows that they have never been able to fully capitalize on.
I own an Xbox, a PS5, a Switch, a Steam Deck, a high powered gaming desktop, several arcade games, and basically all the retro consoles.
But that is the CMAs argument. That this will make Microsoft too dominant in the cloud streaming space.
Their sales there are in the neighborhood of $5B annually (~2% of their overall run rate). Add a guess of $500m for Activision's UK sales for a total of $5.5B.
The hit to sales would be temporary; the UK government would eventually capitulate as their citizens revolt at not being able to buy Windows or Office. (Yes, there are other options but a sudden loss of access to Microsoft products would be devastating.)
Based on the numbers, it's not clear to me that the UK has the leverage to stop this merger. If they were still part of the EU, this calculus wouldn't begin to make sense.
I don't think it is necessarily how Microsoft will proceed, but it would be irresponsible for them not to consider such an approach.
I also do think the CMA is overplaying its hand; sooner or later they will make a decision like this and a company will pull out of their market. Alone, they simply don't have the economic heft to regulate global companies domiciled outside their borders.
They obviously can. They don't operate in every country in the world, and there is nothing forcing them to operate in the UK. It would be irresponsible not to consider a move like this weighed against the relatively small contribution the UK makes to their global revenue.
> giving up any business with NATO
I am suggesting that they have to be weighing temporary loss of the entire UK market; losing direct purchases by NATO would presumably be smaller than the entire UK market.
This isn't emotional at all. I am just suggesting that it has to be something they are considering as an option for completing the merger that their executives believe is important. Relatively speaking: they are willing to spend 14 years of their UK sales to buy Activision, so presumably they think it's important.
But I'd absolutely love to see one of the big guys try this, it would be super interesting to watch.
The UK will probably allow those to be sold.
If MS refuse to sell them, the politicians will just spin it as Microsoft vs the UK and get everyone worked up over “sovereignty”. Maybe even fund and promote a standardised Linux Desktop distribution to replace Windows … which has a chance to spread in popularity worldwide.
Either way, Microsoft might be jeopardising future sales of its products in the UK by going on the offensive. It might also make other countries’ governments warily of the company and impacting sales in those countries too.
It would leaves the market wide open for their competitors to claim without any resistance from Microsoft as well.
Fair! Playing it out...if the UK allowed Microsoft products to be sold, but not products from the gaming division, that also might cause consumer unrest. Other than fines and/or preventing sales, there aren't all that many sanctions available to regulators in a situation like this.
> Maybe even fund and promote a standardised Linux Desktop distribution to replace Windows
I'm old enough to have gone all-in on Microsoft alternatives around the turn of the century. European countries have been pushing initiatives like this for decades without meaningful results. Maybe this time it would work?
> It also leaves the market wide open for their competitors to claim without resistance from Microsoft.
This could be good overall for the long term of the software ecosystem, although the sudden transition would be detrimental for UK citizens in the near-to-medium term.
Some people will complain. Others will just buy a PlayStation. Sony can even "sweeten the deal" by giving discounts on the console and maybe talk publishers into allow people to swap their Xbox copy of a game for the PS version for maybe a small fee, and come off looking like a hero.
Basically if the Xbox gets banned in the UK. It's pretty much free real estate for Sony and Nintendo to move in.
> I'm old enough to have gone all-in on Microsoft alternatives around the turn of the century. European countries have been pushing initiatives like this for decades without meaningful results. Maybe this time it would work?
Frankly, no one has really made a focus effort to replace Windows. It's more trouble than it's worth. But if MS declares war on the UK and Windows is out of the picture ... and once the ball gets rolling and should a standardized Linux Desktop get critical mass, there is a chance it can become an viable competitor to Windows worldwide.
I suppose they can't really block the merger for their exclusive titles seeing as all of Microsofts's competitors are the same or worse when it comes to exclusives, but I'm still surprised someone managed to convince these people that cloud gaming was going to be the way this merger was going to bite people in the arse.
I do hope regulatory bodies will maintain these decisions across other platforms as well (i.e. Sony's acquisitions, Epic Games) but I'm not sure that's realistic if cloud gaming is cited as the main reason why two tech conglomerates merging is a bad idea.
- merge everywhere else but the UK (presumably that would mean spinning off/closing one of Microsoft or Activision UK branch). I guess that wouldn't be enough?
- both companies have to pull off of the UK?
It has nothing to do with their core business (which is quite diverse to be fair), and as an end consumer, on average, this would just cause harm long term, considering consoles and gaming market in general.
One example: Call of Duty. Might not be important for many people, but having CoD become unavailable on the most popular console, just because someone had huge amounts of money and bought a $69B dollar company doesn't sound fair and would be a net loss for the industry.
It would still be available for at least 10 years even if the deal went through.
I really wish there were investors who could better invest in the indie game market and at least take more risks and burn more cash, even if it's socially questionable.
Every respectable gamer knows, deep in his heart, that the AAA game business is a horror show.
I restrict myself to indie games and I have more and more trouble finding a game that I can actually like and spend time with, it's hard to say if that's because I'm old or if I have very specific tastes or if I set the bar too high.
There are a lot of developers out there who are ready to make games, yet it seems the market rarely lets them. Of course, quality matters, but the top reason I want to make games, is because I cannot find games I can enjoy, would they AAA or indie.
Important note: I dislike capitalism.
The challenge is that many games are labors of love that are fantastically unprofitable. AAA games with microtransactions are unpopular but very lucrative.
How do you resolve that oxymoron?
These games tend to be F2P to have a community for the whales to play with, but the games aren't particularly fun and popular enough to attract a large player base that will pay for the game.
Free things that people play because it's free aren't the most popular, they are just available.
Ubisoft is far from bankrupt. EA is far from bankrupt. All the microtransactions, all the stupid "big open world" bollocks, all mind numbing grind-a-thons, the sheer creative bankruptcy that AAA games often show... they are what people consistently vote for, every year
In the last month, the last Carl On Duty has made more money than Ultrakill ever will. By a few orders of magnitude. And the same will happen for the next one
If gamers wanted quality, they should have spent their money accordingly instead of consistently buying shit
The key thing is marketing. The giants have insane amounts of budget to market their games to heaven and beyond.
Stop using the devil's advocate at every occasion.
The dev studio of redfall was bought by msft, then the playstation build was scraped.
If true, I would have expected msft to be more cunningly smart, namely to provide a playstation build... but significantly worse than the windoz/xbox builds.
The only way msft could restore confidence would be to provide top notch elf/linux builds of ALL games of ALL its studios (not a few games here and there, and hardly any "significant" ones).
Idem for sony though.
> FTC suing to block Microsoft's $69bn Activision Blizzard acquisition
The British economy cannot work without Windows PCs, the Office suite, and Azure and OneDrive. And banning Microsoft and Activision's games would piss off half of the under 30 crowd, and by proxy, their parents. It would also be unprecedented for any country to do that.
You seem to be under the impression that large firms can just ignore the laws of the countries they do business in. That’s not how it works.
You're not wrong, but that's almost not a sufficient consideration for the British administration in recent years.
There is absolutely no prospect of Microsoft deciding to try and do that. Nil. None.
Putting aside that there’s technology from UK companies in the F-35 (Rolls contributed to the lift fan in the B model, Martin-Baker ejection seats etc), the US needs AUKUS (as a bulwark to China) and the UK’s contribution to NATO (cf AUKUS and add Russia to the mix) more than the UK does, especially in a post-Brexit world where the UK’s influence is significantly diminished.
The EU are also still looking at the deal, with the potential of imposing licensing requirements [1].
1: https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/eu-unlikely-demand-ass...
It would be a pain but they and everybody else would find ways to cope with that.
Before Brexit we used the VAT MOSS system, which allows non-EU companies to register in a single country, collect the appropriate VAT on EU sales, then quarterly send the total VAT collected and a form showing total sales for each country to that single country's tax folks, and that country deals with distributing the VAT to the separate countries.
Post Brexit vote we continued to use VAT MOSS (which has since been renamed to something else that I'm failing to remember) although we switched our registration from the UK to Ireland [1] just in case the UK did something stupid and failed to negotiate a Brexit deal in which they remained part of the VAT MOSS system.
They in fact did fail to remain in the VAT MOSS system, and so we had to register with the UK for VAT. They told is that the tax office was a bit busy dealing with Brexit so it might take a while to actually issue our VAT registration number, which we need in order to actually pay collected VAT to them. They said that until then we should collect VAT, but not call it VAT, and hold on to it.
That was over 4 years ago and we are still waiting.
A country that for 4 years and counting has to tell businesses to not remit collected taxes because that country cannot manage to issue the registration numbers that would allow those businesses to file their tax reports is not a country that instills confidence that they could handle something that is actually hard like switching OS/office suite/cloud.
[1] In retrospect, we should have used Ireland from the start. Getting registered in the first place for VAT MOSS in the UK had involved a lot of paperwork and time, and the quarterly filings required submitting separate spreadsheets for the UK and the rest of the EU.
Ireland registration took a few minutes online. To file we just copy/paste the data from our quarterly VAT report script into a text box on a web form and submit it.
If that is genuinely true, then the British economy has a BIG problem that it needs to resolve. Alongside all the others, of course.
Microsoft and Apple dominate the desktop market, with Microsoft in a commanding lead.
Imagine if the UK government said no one could buy SQL Server, use Excel, or buy new windows machines.
People and companies would have to spend unimaginable amounts of time learning and migrating to alternative tools while at the same time angry at the government for telling them they can't use the tool of their choice.
The same is true for Apple. If the UK government said Apple could no longer do business in the UK, the UK economy would be crushed.
Well, yes. An individual company should absolutely not be more powerful than an entire state. Yes, migrating away from Microsoft would be painful and expensive, but it must be possible, otherwise Microsoft can get whatever it wants from the UK on pains of pulling its business.
I would expect that much of the British Government, including its armed/security forces, rely on those MS products and services. As such, I think that telling a big major US ally "tough luck, you're on your own right now" in the middle of this very tense global political climate is not in the best interests of Microsoft the US company.
No it can't. You are immediately cutoff from payment and transaction systems and you have no legal basis for selling anything in the country.
On top of that, there's the obvious factor of being it very simple to completely block you online.
Another example, you may not be aware of it, but many companies can't do business in Europe or European countries. E.g. several US media outlets don't want to comply with European privacy laws.
If they can't do business in a country they can't, simple as that.
Even the rest of your comment is even more ridiculous.
A company trying to force its hand against legislation like that is a business-harakiri. You can't possibly think such stuff isn't looked upon by other business actors and governments.
I know they won't actually do that, but it would seem they would make more money in the US, Canada, EU and other countries that approve the deal, than they would if they ignore the deal and stay in the UK.
Besides which, the UK would relent and ask them to come back anyway.
Openly breaking the law sounds like a great plan. Do you have a podcast with other great tips like this? E.g. "just don't pay taxes" or "you can steal stuff when nobody is looking".
These financial sanctions could swallow up any and all profit from the UK market
Similar situation to other jurisdictions (EU, China, India, etc.)
I don't see any reason as to why this couldn't happen, the EU has already demonstrated its concerns on relying too much in certain companies, and they don't have as much of a flagrant issue as the aforementioned agressive move would imply.
Microsoft and Activision do both have various subsidiaries in the UK, too.
Could Microsoft Activision in theory pull out of the entire UK market and still merge (not just gaming, stop selling Office in the UK for example)? Yes. Will they? Absolutely not. There are significant chunks of Microsoft shareholders who don't want to do this deal in the first place and they certainly aren't going to torch the profitable bits of Microsoft for the gaming division, which has terrible financial performance.
Which is why such mergers take a long time.
Now, being both based in the US, the US could say no and it would not happen and no need for any other regulator to consider the merger.
Strictly speaking, _none_ of the regulators can individually stop a merger (even if it's the home country regulator, the multinational can just redomicile) but in practice they all have a veto, because the multinational wants to be allowed do business everywhere.
Consequently any regulator in charge of a sufficiently important market has de-facto veto power globally.
Because it could just be a matter of the CMA being the first to say no...
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.
Hypothetically, if MS + Activision - UK > MS + UK - Activision (assuming it's only blocked in UK), it's plausible that Microsoft withdraws from UK to pursue its business with the merger everywhere else. The UK is a decent sized market, but it's far from the biggest.
I wonder if MSFT is considering that at all. They obviously have the numbers, but I wouldn't be surprised if cloud gaming hasn't seen the growth they expected and it makes sense to kill it entirely.
Then again, we know they operate in countries fundamentally opposed to their "corporate values". So who knows.
beyond the hype and the takes, it's probably 0%.
> FTC suing to block Microsoft's $69bn Activision Blizzard acquisition
what are they going to do, ban games from the US?