Microsoft wins FTC fight to buy Activision Blizzard
theverge.com
theverge.com
It certainly harms consumers, so I don't see how the court still approved this especially with the judge's comment against the comparison to Sony. Almost all mergers of this size harm consumers, the fact that it's allowed by default is the crucial issue.
If the FTC still had a spine they would go after all of these kinds of exclusive deals - and not just limited to games.
The film industry was famously broken up such that the production companies couldn't own theaters yet in 2023 that rule (if it still exists) is so weak that most production companies have their streaming service and aggressively pressure theaters into exclusivity Windows.
At the end of the day this only strengthens the trend to PC gaming which only benefits Microsoft and can only hurt Sony. It would only be a minor surprise if Sony joined the Proton/WINE effort with Valve to get around Microsoft exclusives. (Which does help consumers but in a 3D chess kind of way).
Now we are in the same position as a hundred years ago. At that time you would have to go into a theatre by the production company and now you have to go to the streaming service of the production company.
That split between production and distribution has to come back.
What if Netflix had made and won that argument before 2020 to prevent production companies from also streaming content? I think Netflix missed a trick here.
It could have led the distribution/streaming industry instead of being just another content/streaming player.
The only coincidence is this repeal happening during a time where it mattered least.
I'm listening...
> by speeding up the transition to "streaming" games and cloud gaming
Ewww... no thanks!
I’m not a very good with high speed games anyways, so the increased latency isn’t generally noticeable in the games I play.
Steam has done a remarkable job staying open for 20 years (My copy of Half Life 2 is right where I left it). Sony has done a reasonable job. I don’t know about Microsoft. Nintendo has failed several times, but may have finally figured it out with the Switch.
I know I can buy discs and cartridges from any previous era and as long as I have a system (or emulator), I can play them, lend them, or sell them. Digital versions allow me to play, but for how long. I can’t lend or sell them. If I get the urge to play Resogun in 2033 and don’t have it downloaded, am I going to be able to?
I do think there may be a generational component to it as well. I’ve always thought Gen X is more tied to the idea of “owning” a copy (music, movies, games), while younger generations are more comfortable with digital only releases, or even subscription catalogues that change over time as the primary means of entertainment.
The standard physical editions still include a disc or cartridge and occasionally just a code.
With the development cycle and Sony and Microsoft’s distribution setup as it is now, physical copies effectively act as a token to play the game only. Using Cyberpunk 2077 as an example a recent patch to the game mandated a nearly full redownload of the whole game on PS5 and Xbox Series - ~60+GB. On PC it was ~5G.
source?
I'm fine enough with piracy being the nuclear option if we run into situations like with F-Zero or Legends of Dragoon or whatnot. But there are official options for almost every other game I would be interested in re-visiting. I still like owning a disc the same way I like owning a physical book, but I'd be lying if I said I ever popped in a disc for any 10+ year old game. It's more of a sentimental gesture to display on my shelf than a means of preservation.
Not actually owning the games is a problem. Nvidia's service, GeForce Now, originally allowed you to play any game you had purchased on Steam, under the theory that you were using your license to play it. Their library was decimated when that was challenged legally.
Most of the services don't offer the same modding options as you would have on PC either.
If I were to pick between the two, I'd rather we move towards having more control over the things we purchase than less.
People often seem to have a general sense of helplessness when it comes to large businesses, why get upset about it when there's nothing you can do?
I don't see anything unless people find the motivation to make it a political issue.
A personal anecdote that I think exemplifies the problem:
I was once double invoiced for custom charges by FedEx. The phone number on the invoice lead to a phone tree where every option simply hung up. Depending on where I looked there were three different email addresses, and an online form; only one provided an automated response and my first three emails were ignored entirely. Their customer support line was unable to connect to that department.
At one point I was given an individual's work email and received no response either. Despite this, I continued to receive past due, and final notice letters from them.
It took months and hours of my time to resolve a problem they created, had I not persisted, I would have had to deal with collections and credit agencies.
Why should we allow companies behave this way without repercussions?
Moving from an ownership model to a rental model is very anti-consumer.
So, sure, some people prefer to rent their couch. That's fine. You're effectively arguing that couch ownership should be forbidden.
You are going to have to provide a more compelling argument that "Well, I play every game only once, for 90m, before moving on to the next, so we should enforce my preference onto everybody!"
The majority of gamers don't play more than a handful of games in a year. There's just no time. You find a game you're into, your pour most of your hours into that game.
It described life in an unnamed city in which the narrator does not own a car, a house, any appliances, or any clothes, and instead relies on shared services for all of his daily needs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You%27ll_own_nothing_and_be_ha...
True. Although, satire does tend to exaggerate to make its point. (I'm assuming the indicated source is at least in part satire, not having yet read it.)
Related to rent vs own: public libraries are (in a sense) renting, just paid for either indirectly or by other people.
> Fact is that deluxe entertainment isn't some crucial necessity for most people. So of course they don't mind the lack of ownership.
Until they try to play something from the past, and can't, because it relied on a game server, streaming server, or some other kind of remote asset that was not preserved. This portends a greater loss of shared culture compared to that which can be backed up or archived. Some people might be working on that, but I expect most will be made preservable only by rare rights-holders or illicit propagation.
Nope. If you own something you can leave it to your kids.
If you rent it, you can't.
We've done this dance with streaming video in the past. First renting was cheaper and easier. Then renting was the only option, and it stopped being cheaper or easier.
1. you can still buy the blu-ray for any given recent movie. For non-movies, the alternative was cable, which you did not own. And hoping that they'd release a collection on DVD/BD
2. Despite all the price hikes, streaming is still more bang for your buck unless you only watch 1-2 movies a month. And still much more convinent. We;re not at this point in time in video, so i'm not worried about games in the next 20 years hitting that.
In that case the consumers have worked against their best interests for decades in other mediums. You can even argue as such in the PC market where physical media has also lost.
>some people prefer to rent their couch. That's fine. You're effectively arguing that couch ownership should be forbidden.
in the same way in that you can still buy a CD or even record of a recent song, I'm sure you'll have physical media for quite a while.
But we should also face reality and realize that most people are fine renting media, so it should be no surprise if companies start to tailor towards the majority.
>You are going to have to provide a more compelling argument
sure: https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/11/mobile-games-now-account-f...
>In the U.S., users generally have eight games installed per device; globally, we play an average of two to five games per month.
we should never discount the mobile market in these discussions. nor teenagers.
I fail to see how this is a good thing.
Once again, this is deluxe entertainment, and the overall impact of spending more money on a hobby isn't the end of the world. I'm not going to judge how others use their free time and disposable income.
That wasn't your argument. If you wanted to argue that, you should have done so from the beginning.
Your argument was that it is more beneficial for players to pay many times the price of any game they play often.
No it wasn't. My arugment is that this is what players are doing already. I don't care about how you feel about gaming habits. My only point in replying to you is to say that
>The majority of gamers don't play more than a handful of games in a year. There's just no time. You find a game you're into, your pour most of your hours into that game.
is wrong. You asked for proof against that and I gave you a link for gaming trends. You countered with "That's not a good thing", and I don't care. Because that's not my argument. Whever you inferred that I applied personal judgement to these statistics is wrong until you made your comment about that judgement.
So there you have it. If you want to shift your argument to "this isn't good for the consumer"... well, I gave you my take. Take it or leave it, I have nothing more to add to that discussion. If you want to go back to talking about what and how people consume games, feel free to respond to that.
Yes, people do play multiple games a month, so they are also fine renting games to consume more. Even in console games, there are so many accounts to how Gamepass has reinvigorated some people to playing more games than before.
It is more desirable. So is not having to be connected to the internet to play your games. So is not paying for something that can be taken from you at any time for any reason without reimbursement. So is having a copy of your game that can't be edited or censored at any time (including silently) and which can always be played in its original form.
Also desirable is the ability to modify or patch the games you paid for however you like, even in ways publishers wouldn't approve of. So is the ability to let a friend borrow the game. So is the ability to resell your games. So is the ability to pass them down to your kids or grand kids.
When all you have is "gaming as a service" you'll be giving up a hell of a lot more than a disk or a box on your shelf. Companies love cloud/subscription based gaming because it gives them far more control, gives them new ways to collect data on users and new ways to push ads at them, and it allows them to force gamers to pay for their games over and over again instead of it being just a one time purchase.
I don't care how "casual" a gamer someone is, they will never be better off giving up so much in exchange for so little, especially since what little they do get is all subject to change at any time, just like the ongoing costs will be.
I want to download the media to my hard drive, store it on my NAS, back it up in any way, and be able to install it from those sources whenever I want.
I also want licenses to be maintained outside of walled gardens using digital signatures, which I can also maintain my own copy of. As long as I present my license file along with signed game media, I want my console or PC to be able to run that game.
I should also be able to lend, sell, and trade the digital license to anyone along with a copy of the media.
Especially the silent/forced updates. It can be SO bad in games. since the OP is about blizzard- look at hearthstone. Its a card game where you can’t trade, and the cards you sank money into can just get nerfed when the next expansion comes out. It amazes me this is acceptable to some.
maybe you should care more, then. Because you clearly haven't considered the POV of the casual gamer. They want to see a game, download it, tinker for a few hours, and move on. They don't care about data or ads and they sure won't stick around long for subscriptions.
You can't understand an audience if you dismiss them like that.
Going from an ownership model to a rent-extracting subscription model is a HORRIBLE idea that almost no one wants (just execs who see $$$ and few gamers living in cities with low-latency high bandwidth internet)
We've already seen how this plays out with the proliferation of SAAS and the move to subscription models that leave consumers with nothing if the company goes bust or they stop paying.
Companies that grow beyond a certain size are harmful to the economy. The harm to consumers isn't always direct or obvious but it reduces choice and creates a situation where the company wields outsized power over consumers and the state.
I mostly like Microsoft but they should be a much smaller and more focused company.
That said, I don't have a problem with the merger. It won't help consumers and it won't help people working for the studios. That was not the case in any merger in the past.
While they have a lot of solid IPs that will generate billions for years to come, I believe these studios have a hard time to innovate. The likelihood that at some point someone will eat their lunch is pretty high. Gaming IPs have a lot of momentum, but there are always new challengers around the corner.
Honestly... IMO that analysis is completely misguided and nearly contradictory.
Even if I accept the premise that the merger will (1) increase cloud and game streaming and (2) cloud/streaming games is good for consumers, I would argue it "harms consumers" under the legal anti-competitive and anti-trust arguments.
My argument is that achieving premise (1) via a merger is by-definition anti-consumer because it would strengthen cloud/game streaming outside of actual consumer demand. It's not possible or the place for the courts to decide what consumers "want" beyond high level details like cost, and availability, etc.
There's no rule preventing Activison from licensing it's games to Microsoft's, Sony's, etc. cloud gaming services. If there was genuine consumer demand for cloud gaming, then Activison is in the perfect position to get the best deal from all/any of the existing cloud gaming providers.
> (Article) Subscriptions and streaming have turned the music and television industries upside down in the past couple of decades.
Music, TV, and Film streaming all grew out of independent providers. Really it started with rentals which used the "first-sale" doctrine to even exist - it doesn't get much more independent than buying the standalone product and renting it. The fact that TV/Movie streaming is now fragmenting is causing large amounts of pain and cost for consumers not less. Over the past decade only Music streaming has remained simple and cheap - and all of the major providers here are independent of the record companies.
Microsoft and Sony aren't the only companies making video games.
Windows isn't the only PC operating system.
In large part thanks to Steam, a lot of video games work on Linux nowadays.
Sony is free to implement their OS in such a way that you can play PC games on Playstation. Of course Sony doesn't want that, because it is Sony's strategy to wall off their ecosystem.
SONY IS THE BAD GUY HERE.
Strengthening PC market is a good news for consumers. Strengthening Microsoft - not necessarily…
Edit: Though maybe you're talking flappy bird and I'm talking triple-A, actually impressive boundary pushing game. We may just be talking past one another
And if you complain buy a laser printer and never complain again.
I work in gaming at Microsoft and I really enjoy it. I think Microsoft gives us a ton of space to explore and make our own impact and I am a huge fan* of Phil Spencer.
> Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision has been described as the largest in tech history. It deserves scrutiny. That scrutiny has paid off: Microsoft has committed in writing, in public, and in court to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation for 10 years on parity with Xbox.
How does this make anyone feel any better? What happens after 10 years? Microsoft has been around for 4x that long.
What happens in less than 10 years if they don't abide by it?
Does Activision get split back out? I doubt it.
We're long past the point where you can just set rules/laws and companies will abide by it. We need to be at the point where we also list the punishment ahead of time.
Likely nothing. I don't understand why people believe in these things.
> We're long past the point where you can just set rules/laws and companies will abide by it.
What's the rule / law here anyhow? There are always workarounds, e.g. it says it will keep it in parity with xbox... well what if they called a new console something else?
If they write up a contract with penalty provisions, this could able be guaranteed through civil court.
It is not some crazy unsolved question as to how to get a company to commit to something in the future.
No kidding. They could just introduce a new game franchise called "Duty of Call - Warfare That's Modern" and make that Xbox exclusive instead. Or any number of other workarounds and sneaky tactics.
Likely Sony will take them to the cleaners.
Would they just build a COD that is dependent on specific MS tech so they cannot release it on competing systems? Why not try and rebrand Call of Duty so that it isn't in violation? Just call it 'Duty'. It starts to get very grey very quickly.
We're not, but this is pretty nebulous stuff. The state blocking freely agreed transactions because it can foresee some damage is not exactly a clear cut good, other than for people who are reassured by the idea of the state as a benevolent, all-knowing mom and pop, and for the lawyers who get paid a fortune to debate past and future hypotheticals.
What about this: allow the merger, and if the harm is done, the company must pay, but if the harm is not done, the state must pay?
Companies with more resources than small countries are often too big to regulate because they capture the regulators and/or the judiciary.
Prevention is cheaper than treatment, especially when treatments have proven so ineffective.
Regulatory capture is entirely the fault of the regulator. They don't have to be captured. They choose to be. A government body, funded by taxes, that decides to be captured, is a complete disgrace. People work hard to pay taxes, and they shouldn't be spent on employing people who choose to align with those they should be regulating.
> Prevention is cheaper than treatment, especially when treatments have proven so ineffective.
The same state that has the power to prevent has the power to treat. It chooses not to. Switching approach won't help. Getting regulators to do their jobs will.
Anyone who has worked at large corporate bureaucracies knows they are just as slow and rule bound as government departments and in many ways worse. At least there are some well motivated people in government.
Government is us. The people. We’ve delegated it to an elite class that gets more and more cut off from the common politik as time goes by.
I see no easy solution . Power does not willingly give up power.
The FTC identified not having CoD on multiple platforms as a large issue. What payment is justified if Microsoft doesn't allow CoD on multiple platforms?
It's easy to say "if harm is done, the company must pay" but look how long we've know leaded gasoline was harmful, look how long we've know abestoes was harmful, look how long we've know pfas was harmful, look how long we've know cigarettes are harmful. And then look how long it took for any company to pay after fighting tooth and nail saying it wasn't harmful despite their _own_ internal research saying the contrary.
Sure, CoD is not in the same scope as leaded gasoline. The point still remains, a harm has been identified and I don't think they should be allowed to merge so long as the punishment for that harm occurring isn't pre-determined.
What perspective has been applied to this?
We don't have to debate past and future hypotheticals - that's an invention of the "consumer welfare" theory of antitrust. The one that said it's entirely fine for, say, Apple to have a monopoly on iOS software as long as they have a prosocial justification for it. Apple's specific argument is that their monopoly protects from malware... or, in other words, they're big enough that they can make and enforce their own laws.
A better and simpler rule is this: being big is illegal, period. That's how antitrust used to work. If a business deal would give you the capability of becoming your own sovereign state, you don't get to execute that deal. If you knock out all your competition, we break you up into competing companies.
This is the sort of thing that triggers free market types, I know. My argument is specifically that large businesses get to write their own rules, and the only way to prevent them from doing that is to make them small enough that they cannot execute political power equivalent to that of a monarch. Right now, we live in this comedic parody of free market liberalism where the business owners have centralized power to themselves, turning themselves into de-facto states, and gotten the de-jure state drunk on surveillance tech to avoid scrutiny.
I'm sure Phil Spencer will be interested to know that he can fit into a can :)
Remember, MS is in business to make money, not to win the console wars. Buying the CoD (etc) IP at an inflated price and then immediately cutting off more than half of the revenue would be so mind-boggingly stupid, almost to the point of malpractice. This is why they really don't even need to be forced into saying they'll maintain it for 10 years on PS.
It's all about moving gaming to a recurring revenue model. So you don't care about if the consumer made a one time purchase of your console (in fact, you might even prefer they didn't if you're losing money on each one!), but you do care about the fact that they're playing your games.
Ben Thompson put it better than I could:
> Notice that this is for games that are purchased, and keep in mind that Microsoft’s goal with the Activision acquisition is not to gain exclusive games to sell but rather games to subscribe to. As I’ve argued the only way this acquisition makes sense is the extent to which it makes possible a new business model for gaming; simply buying exclusives via established titles like Call of Duty would be hugely value destructive.
>What is notable about Microsoft’s subscription push is that it aligns the company’s Xbox division with Microsoft’s overall push towards cloud computing and subscription services. What is interesting to consider are two questions:
>First, would Microsoft have ever gone down this path absent the investment in its original (failed) Xbox strategy? I would argue the answer is no; this is a reasonable leveraging of Xbox assets, but I do wonder if Microsoft could go back two decades if they would even bother.
>Second, if regulators were to kill this deal (Microsoft still needs approval from the UK and the US) would Xbox be long for this world? It’s hard to see how the division makes sense if Microsoft has the current business model dictated to them, given just how dominant Sony is with said business model.
https://stratechery.com/2023/uk-blocks-microsoft-activision-... (paywalled)
I just don't really get the argument of "We won't do this for 10 years". OK, what about after that?
Case in point: Sony PlayStation is one of Azure’s largest customers
It’s strange for Nintendo not to see this
Skyrim has supposedly sold around 60 million copies over the span of 12 years. Let's be generous and say those sold at an average of $60 each (probably less in practice due to sales, etc.)
That's $3.6b USD in raw revenue. Pretty sick!
On the other hand, as of 2022 (Skyrim numbers are 2023), Call of Duty as a franchise had generated over $31b USD in raw revenue. 10x that of Skyrim, Bethesda's biggest title.
So in terms of scale, I don't see how making Starfield exclusive can possibly be on the same level as the idea of making the whole CoD franchise exclusive. Certainly it would be impactful but I can understand treating them differently.
Microsoft are REALLY good at playing the long game.
My disagreement would be that you're comparing an installment with a franchise. The whole of the Elder Scrolls is bigger than Skyrim, although Skyrim was the biggest standalone seller. Elder Scrolls online has I think about 750k MAUs, at $10-$15/mo.
And, I suppose more fundamentally, why would MS turn down a good chunk of $3.6b for the dev costs of making a Playstation version of Starfield?
funny thing is that if you compared the last 15 years of COD to Elder scrolls, you're still comparing some dozen COD games to Skyrim and ESO. And I guess that one mobile game? 15 years ago is still a year after Oblivion launched.
So why are Redfall and Starfield Xbox exclusives? Wouldn't they make more money by releasing them for Playstation too?
CoD on the other hand is already a huge name, that releases every year (i.e. recurring revenue, even if it's not a subscription per se), and MS is paying a huge premium for it. Forcing people over to game pass in that case isn't worth taking the hit to reliable revenue you're virtually already guaranteed to get from PS owners.
To be clear: I think it's less important to worry about this as less of a PC/Xbox exclusive than a Game Pass exclusive/available. I'd be willing to bet if Sony approached MS to bring Game Pass to PS, MS would be super willing to do it. Not that Sony would given their business model, but that's basically the point. It's not HW platform exclusivity, but store/subscription exclusivity.
Fair if you want to posit that VR is a niche market. But.... honestly, so is the entire Xbox market.
Microsoft's subscription push can't work without winning the console wars since Sony isn't about to let them put GamePass on PS since that kills Sony's revenue model. (That would itself be a very interesting antitrust case.)
So they still want to win the console wars, they just want to monetize that victory differently. But pulling things like Starfield - and eventually COD - off of other platforms is 10000% still aligned with "making as much money as possible."
because at this point, even if Xbox's weren't profitable, ending the Xbox brand would harm confidence in Gamepass.
Not that Xbox isn't profitable. But even in the worst case they have negative incentive to pull out.
Embrace the business (with money), extend the functionality (Xbox exclusive features), Extinguish the competition (drop support).
"The slow blade penetrates the shield."
They're clearly "Ok, we have more room to legally get away with XYZ now so LETS GO FOR IT!!!!".
Feels like these kind of issues are what anti-trust should have handled.
That lock in of the 90's never really stopped, they just figure out how to make it look better. The only times they gave up on the lock in was when it was starting to look really bad and even then they just pivot the messaging and then try to lock themselves in. Look at MS with "We love Linux", it didn't slow Windows down one bit.
https://www.khronos.org/blog/you-can-use-vulkan-without-pipe...
Which is refreshing.
Most games rely on engines that support Vulkan better now (like UE5), so there is not much of an interest I guess.
I’m surprised people didn’t wake up with the One era lies he kept pushing, and given HNs general distaste for “marketer talk”, how can one be a fan of a dude that every time he opens his mouth, it’s marketing talk (when it’s not a lie). This dude would constantly say shit like “the console wars are stupid. We need to all get along”. And then when pressed about “hidden DGPU” that he knew didn’t exist, he lies and responds “we are not letting Sony have a hardware advantage”. This dude is a scumbag.
He’s been terrible for Xbox, and now his horrid management of Xbox has led to being terrible for gaming in general.
Big fan? Nah.
None of it really matter though, because even forgetting Phil obviously constantly fanning the console wars, he’s presided over Xbox for what like 10 years? In that time, what he’s managed to do is be a baby, and complain that his ineffective management is leading to their console having no games.
To me it's incomprehensible how they managed to f-up Halo Infinite, then just stand there in silence and then say, yeah we are sorry for not having a lot of interesting titles on Xbox, but here's what's coming next year.
If I were a game dev at Microsoft, I'd be furious!
Yeah, heard that one before.
> Oh but we promised Call of Duty and this is Duty Called, so we don't have to care about anything we have promised before.
I mean, this is Microsoft.
Optimistically, Sony utilizes their Bungie aquisition and makes something worthy as a competitor. I imagine the 10 years is less a promise and more of a timer, and 10 years is enough for a AAA company to get at least a few attempts.
Pessimistically, MS drives Activision to the ground and COD isn't even a valuable IP anymore. Bigger icons have fallen from grace faster.
"FTC: We've heard about the harms to Sony...
Judge: This is about the harms to the consumer not to Sony. Let's take a break until 4:05."
I still wonder what all of this is worth given that the merger was blocked in the UK.
> MLex also reported last month that Microsoft was exploring options to close the deal despite the UK block, which could have involved closing over the UK decision and potentially carving out Activision in the UK. That’s a messy process, and it looks like both parties are now willing to negotiate to avoid it.
The way things are looking in the UK assets their might not have a long shelf life
It might turn around if their government changes after the election, but who wants to bet on that? It is looking really dismal
Meanwhile I do expect more Xbox exclusives - which will ultimately harm consumers.
I own nothing and am so grateful. /$
Is Microsoft going to buy Steam and delete my game library there next?
Gabe's not gonna live forever. Never know what will happen in some 15-20 years if he retires and/or is simply unable to manage Valve.
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/kotick-expected-to-leave-activ...
https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/23/23771828/microsoft-bethed...
I love Nintendo but they compete more with Apple and Google than they do with Sony and Microsoft.
If Microsoft exits game consoles next generation Sony won’t have any real competition and that will be very bad for consumers.
Microsoft needs their own heavy hitting exclusives and they need them sooner than they can home grow them. This acquisition is one of the only ways they can do that.
I’d rather we don’t allow bad M&As, even for good reasons.
It competes like a Honda Civic competes with a Chevrolet Corvette.
Both in 2017:
7:13.9 - Chevrolet Corvette C7 Z06 Christian Gebhardt.
7:43.8 - Civic Type R, Honda didn't name the driver.
Having said that the Nintendo Switch competes against the Series X in my home for time. It has some seriously good titles that my son loves to play.
https://www.motortrend.com/news/2023-honda-civic-type-r-nurb...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_Civic_Type_R
I eventually ended up with an electric car instead (Tesla LR3), but spent hours looking at this - and the Subaru WRX.
Thank you!
That's not true. Both sides have made handhelds as well as full gaming consoles.
Just because Nintendo's current focus is the handheld switch and Sony dropped their handheld for now doesn't mean things won't change.
Quality of games doesn't matter so much. If someone is spending hours playing Tears of the Kingdom, that's time not spent on playing games on another console.
Even with your analogy there will be some people who can afford 2 cars and drive them for different occasions but others only dedicate to just one. And even then a person can only drive one car at a time.
Two words: Sega Dreamcast.
Microsoft is seriously behind this generation and I just don't see them continuing next generation if they can't make up some ground this one.
What about after those 10 years? What about anything not Call of Duty?
Tim has recently said he has the full source code to the original and the design doc to the planned sequel...
Here’s a tangent:
The most popular sports leagues in the world are mimicked by people all over the world who play casual and team sports. The game itself is not proprietary.
Why can’t we make popular open source video games? If games were not owned by a single entity, anyone could host tournaments and leagues, more similar to baseball, basketball, and football. We could all play the same game.
OpenTTD is a cult classic and has no mass market appeal.
It takes thousands to produce the simplest video games.
Well, there are some. Check out Bitburner, Battle for Wesnoth, 0 A.D, etc.
The serious answer is that it's very hard work that requires a multi-year development cycle and a diverse variety of talent (design, art, etc) in addition to software engineering.
In addition, a lot of the tools and game engines used to create AAA titles are very expensive (and closed-source).
If you've got a team working on a game in just their spare time, it's going to be very dated by the time it actually launches.
I think a part of it is that the video game industry is good at absorbing a lot of people with talent. Game folks are at the intersection of arts and technology but it also isn't firmly in either camp, so people can be poached away fairly easily from open projects if they have a lot of talent.
Nothing is stopping anyone and there are a few. Nothing as big as COD but they exist. But I imagine the result will be similar to how traditional sports work. There will be one big definitive organization for a sport (let's say COD or this example), a few large minor leagues (some knockoff CODs that are fun but nowhere near as popular), and then some small pickup games in a field (the indie games some single dev makes that no one will find).
As a complete tangent, the Touhou series is famously loose in its license and many fans and companies alike have utilized the IP to make games and every other kind of media.
Unfortunately that’s just the standard. I mean look at AT&T.
AT&T assets are valued at almost twice of T-Mobile (~$400B vs ~$211B). AT&T is also ahead of Verizon (~$377B) by a nice margin. It’s also right behind Verizon in revenue, and ahead of T-Mobile ($136B for Verizon, $120B for AT&T, and $80B for T-Mobile).
Thats not really the case, no. Sony is the monopoly market leader in the console space right now.
It would be more likely to be illegal for Sony to do this, and it is not illegal for microsoft to do the same, because Microsoft is not the monopoly market leader in the console space.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_of_Duty
Let’s hope for Sony, and the sake of growth and creativity that by 2033, we are moving past CoD onto newer, fresher, better games.
Sony does not own Square-Enix.
How much do ports normally cost? How many units would they need to move to hit even?
The exclusive addressable market for each is definitely big enough to outweigh porting costs.
A good first step would be to ban exclusivity agreements, rather than mandate cross platform availability and to fine both parties heavily for suspected foul play.
Exclusivity agreements are a great example of something that is directly harmful to consumers. It removes choice, increases cost, encourages electronic waste, and leads to an inferior experience.
And that's not even getting into their game-adjacent deals (AMD, various cloud services) and the dozens of crossovers with the stragest companies (remember when Final Fantasy 13 released some Louis Vuitton fashion line?)
My point was that just releasing everything day one on xbox live cannot be a long term sustainable strategy as you're only making $15/month or whatever from that user, but it isn't dumping.
Either they will just break the deal and pay the fines (I'm not sure of the exact details of the punishment) or they will just give themselves enough technical advantage to make the competition versions unfavorable.
I mean, we don't question a Tiger when it eats someones face - it is just what a Tiger does. This is just how Microsoft and big business works.
Read up on developments in anti-trust in the last couple of years here:
This is a 75 billion dollar event between two giant companies. They can pay for legal advice. That legal advice is well incentivized to predict how the case will go, and signed off on it. I assume MS has to pay a hefty fee if the acquisition is blocked for antitrust reasons, in addition to the time and embarrassment for all involved.
Therefore, the only cases the FTC should expect to see are ones where highly paid lawyers said "we will probably win this case". They might be wrong (and the FTC does seem unable to stop too many cases), but no matter how tough the enforcement gets, I would expect the FTC to usually lose at trial. The standards will just be applied pre-merger announcement (or probably pre-offer).
It might be an exciting couple of years when the FTC regrows its backbone and the lawyers assessing mergers have not caught up yet.
While Microsoft has promised to keep Call of Duty on the Playstation, I think it would be totally ok if they stopped doing that in the future, as any other Activision-Blizzard game; after all, Uncharted and Last of Us aren't available on the XBOX either.
Maybe both Microsoft and Sony could develop good products that consumers and publishers want to pay money for, rather than make unrelated, restrictive business deals!
I thought you wanted to put aside the superficial sports-team rivalries?
No casual consumer cares about the deals, they care about the games. If this makes better games, cool. If not, not cool. We'll see how history goes this time around.
All the other games built in the same engine by the same studio are released on Xbox and PC.
The producer of Bloodborne doesn't even work at Sony anymore. There's a multitude of reasons Sony is dragging their feet there, unrelated to aquisitions.
How is the Switch not a console?
Even then, there are a ton of games that are available across all platforms, including some AAA ones: Mortal Kombat 11 The Witcher 3 Assassins's Creed (multiple) Skyrim Resident Evil (multiple) Monster Hunter Rise Overwatch 2 etc...
The reason Microsoft and Sony sign exclusive deal is mostly the keep games off each others platforms. Graphics-intensive “AAA” games aren’t going to run on the switch. Nintendo undeniably operates in a distinct segment, even if it’s capable of supporting some limited amount of overlap with the other vendors.
There’s a plethora of articles stating the exact opposite, such as this one:
https://afkgaming.com/esports/guide/is-call-of-duty-coming-t...
It’s something MS has been saying numerous times, including in the FTC court case.
The number of games that are exclusive to a platform that are paid to be that way is actually quite small. Almost all platform exclusives come from companies that are subsidiaries of their respective platform company (343 Studios, Naughty Dog, etc).
The argument of graphic capabilities as something that defines the Switch to be in a different market that’s that of Sony/MS is a straw man argument, IMO. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere in these comments, it’s still competing for peoples’ video game time.
> As I’ve mentioned elsewhere in these comments, it’s still competing for peoples’ video game time.
Penguin and Scholastic are both competing for peoples book reading time, yet they quite clearly compete in different market segments. Your argument is contrived and ignores the fact that consumers understand how these products are differentiated to appeal to different preferences.
Is Sony monopolizing the God of War market because God of War fans understand how those games are differentiated to appeal to their preferences?
The FTC's case that PS and Xbox exist in their own "high-performance console" market is the contrived argument. Honestly, it's dated to even consider consoles their own market. Product planning practice in the games industry these days pretty much looks at 2 markets: the mobile market and the "HD market" (PC + console).
The Switch simple can’t do the same things that an Xbox or PlayStation can do. Many of those consoles top selling games would not be playable on a Switch, because they’re high performance games that require high performance hardware, and the Switch simply isn’t a viable substitute for that. Even for the most graphically demanding games that can run on a Switch, they can only do so with comparatively low resolution and frame rate, which in case you didn’t know, are major selling points for the segments that Microsoft/Sony are competing in.
If you don’t want to accept these plainly obvious facts, why don’t you go and inform r/NintendoSwitch that it’s a viable substitute for a PS5, and see how many people you can convince?
Absolutely no one is arguing this and it's not the point. You should give the commentators on this forum more credit than thinking we aren't aware of the power/capabilities differences.
The "high-end console gaming market" is what is what people are taking issue with. It's such a limiting segmentation and is arguably not a very good definition. There's a console gaming market as a whole, with a subset of it being high-end, that competes on user's gaming time. In my view, that's how it should be defined. There's also the mobile gaming market. Are we to now say the Switch shouldn't belong in the mobile gaming market because of screen size and power capabilities? It doesn't make sense to define the Switch in its own, standalone market. What would it be? Mid-tier portable gaming market? One that has no competitors and it has a monopoly in? That's not practical nor reflective of gaming purchasing habits.
Segregating the market based on capabilities breaks down in many ways. The argument shouldn't be that the Switch should belong in its own category because many people who own an Xbox or a Playstation also happen to own a Switch. Nearly half of Xbox owners also happen to own Playstation console (myself included) so does the fact that there's an overlap now mean that Xbox and PlayStation should be somehow in their own category? Of course not. Nor should the argument be about how it's played. One can that the Switch can be played in a portable manner but I just as easily play on my Playstation or Xbox through my iPad locally or even the cloud. Yes, it's not a popular option but the capabilities are there. All that's left is arguing about whether or not something can play AAA games in higher fidelity. If fidelity is something a gamer is truly after, they'd be buying a PC.
> The FTC insists the Nintendo Switch’s pricing, performance, and content make it an improper substitute at least for purposes of its preliminary injunction motion
I have to kinda agree with the FTC. I consider the Switch to be a very different device than the XBox/PS with different uses as far as the gaming experience I expect. The XBox or PS, on the other hand, I expect to have similar experiences.
As I understand it, but the rest of this is based on skimming the ruling, the judge has to take into account whether the merger will help or hinder customers. MS said "Call of Duty isn't even on all the consoles now, it's just on Playstation and XBox. Let the merger go through and we will port it to the Switch. See how we don't play favorites for our console.". The FTC's response was "there isn't real market for console players of games like COD released on Switch, the Switch isn't a competitor to the XBox for this game"
They do this again later on in regards to the FTC's arguments that cloud gaming and multi-game subscription services are functionally separate markets.
>If the Court was the final decisionmaker on the merits, it would likely find Nintendo Switch part of the relevant market. But it is not. Instead, on a 13(b) preliminary injunction, the FTC need only make a “tenable showing that the relevant market” is Gen 9 consoles. Given the plethora of internal industry documents and the acknowledged differences, the FTC has met its preliminary injunction burden to show the Switch is not included in the relevant market.
>Nintendo made “technical decisions to enable an experience that they thought their customers would want to have, and it’s the best selling console right now in the market. So when I — when people try to tell me it’s not competition — competitive, for any number of reasons, I don’t believe that because I just look at what’s selling
It does not matter if the FTC had a case or not. I do not believe it received a fair trail.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/06/29/watchdog-...
The FTC will never ask for a recursal. I know I would not. You cannot blatantly call a judge corrupt especially when you are a participant in that case.
If you are in the judiciary, your standards must be higher.
From the article:- “Nothing antagonizes a judge with whom you might have litigation in the future like calling them recklessly biased,” he said. “What are the odds that Judge Corley would recuse if she was already choosing to brazen her way through this apparent conflict of interest?”
of course not. Law has much prettier words for that that the FTC could have used. The same words the article uses (they never use "corrupt" in the watchdog quotes).
Besides, I agree with the professor's arguments:
>“A rank-and-file employee at Microsoft would probably not have an interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome of this case. … She's right to look at [the fact that] the division that would be affected by the litigation is not where her son is employed,” he said.
It's the equivalent of some Wal-Mart lawsuit where a judge's grandson is working part time at Wal-Mart.
Go searching for connections and you’ll find them every which way. I suppose we should declare everything illegitimate and corrupt, go back to atomized subsistence farming.
Your son is working for Microsoft, it is a billion dollar case, the question is What would you do? What are your standards?
Do you have a theory of how the tenuous connection you state might induce a district court judge to risk harming her career by making a flimsy decision that can be overturned or, worse, risk criminal prosecution if she was found to be conspiring in illegal dereliction of her duty?
What's the scenario you're implying? You haven't even made an argument. The deal expands a business segment that accounts for less than 10% of Microsoft's revenue, it's not going to make her son rich in stock options. He's 3-4 years into his career and has held an entry-level role at Microsoft less than a year, it's not going to rocket him to the top of the org chart. What's the incentive to induce whatever crimes or corruption you leave unspoken?
You conveniently ignored the argument a sibling poster made that the FTC chose their venue. Why choose this one?
Your take is tabloid pundit banter. Extending such disproportionate knee-jerk prescriptions upon such thin logic would grind any activity to a halt.
Generally, it's up to the judge to decide whether they should recuse themselves from the case. But I think it's fair game to raise such a concern.
Making up theories of how the judge could actually be conspiring to favor one party over the other is really unnecessary.
You know that the law isn't as concrete as you implied, right? It's not merely a mechanical application of rules. There's a lot of room for interpretation, and the interpretation of the rules and how they apply to the factual context has a huge influence to the outcome of the case. Skilled judges are able to write up reasons for awarding the case to either party. When two parties decide to go to court instead of settling, generally their lawyers do believe they have a reasonable chance of winning in court. So it's often not even hard for a judge to justify their decision. Having a judge who is ever so slightly biased towards one party would make it really difficult for the other party to play on a level ground.
There are usually no explicit incentives required for a judge to be biased. Just a general impression of "oh, these Microsoft people are quite nice, my son often tells me about the perks he enjoys at work" _could_ be sufficient to give Microsoft a slight but significant advantage in the case.
In general, I don't think you have any idea how the justice system works, and how delicate it can be. I don't know where you got your dismissive tone from. It's quite obvious you don't know sh!t.
This merger is fine - that’s how I knew the FTC would lose this case.
Microsoft should be offering to to swear off cloud gaming entirely, they should be delighted. Game streaming is a lousy solution that requires enormous investment in specific infrastructure, it would be smart to ignore it and focus on their great subscription service that only requires a $500 Xbox.
Streaming games is an amazing convenience (and value) for those of us who don't want to be limited to an Xbox (poor graphics, limited mouse/keyboard support) but also don't want to shell out $3k for a RTX 4080 rig and all its associated noise and heat.
Where Stadia failed, GeForce Now, Luna, Shadow, and Xbox and PS streaming are still alive and well. And very useful!
I feel like it's only bad because it's still mostly a half-way house. Slapping existing AAA titles onto networked GPUs and calling it a day <> streaming gaming in my view.
Streaming gaming is actually a thing for me when someone builds a game using it that would absolutely not be possible using traditional technology. For example, an MMO so massive that the average player's network stack couldn't handle all of the events, so the only rational option is to render everything on some supercomputer and ship the final frames.
Consider also that you can get a lot of reuse out of a particular scene graph if multiple players are in the same one. Many such cases in streaming gaming. There are new, multi-server engine architectures that will not be possible until we start saying things like "this will be a streaming-only exclusive". That is probably the scariest proposal an MBA in any AAA studio could hear in 2023, so I don't expect you will see Blizzard or Sony playing in this flavor of traffic any time soon.
You can still do the AI screenscrape mouse bots, but there are clever statistical+active hybrid approaches that can catch those assholes too.
Even at 4k, I could play it and my views on game streaming have changed a bit. This was last year and I was using an i7 4770k based system. I can say pretty confidently that I found the local lag spikes from not having a high end gaming PC to be far more frustrating than the consistent 40ms of latency via streaming. Maybe it's because I'm getting older and don't have the same reflexes anymore, but I couldn't even really notice the latency via streaming.
I also think people are seriously overlooking the trend towards secure computing. What if you put a TPM in a video card? Then your video for the game stream can be encrypted and only gets decoded just before being sent to your HDCP compliant monitor. I think it's much harder to build cheats if the client side doesn't have any data to work with beyond video that gets decrypted as it's sent to your monitor.
Heck, even just a lack of local game data gets rid of most cheating, right?
This is a fantastic idea. If you can get the GPU swap chain secured all the way from the datacenter's GPU, even the laziest cheaters would be forced to go buy specialized hardware to strip HDCP, and then find a way to get it back into the damn computer. What a fuckin nightmare, eh? It's almost like a job at that point. This is a massive barrier to entry and would likely eliminate 99%+ of "insecure" gaming experiences.
Could you do something even crazier like an HDMI pass thru terminal that detects the "secure gaming frame" via some signature and is able to decode it on the output? Sell em to gamers for $49.99 like it's a new kind of premium TV box? Doesn't change the security angle (can still break HDCP on the other side), and makes it so the gamer doesn't have to replace any PC hardware or software. Plug the box, load the streaming game website, enter your serial # to bind to your account, and off you go. You'd probably incur some extra latency using the external hardware, but with ASIC/FPGAs you could keep it right at 1-2 frames.
[1]https://youtu.be/EWANLy9TjRc?t=594
[2]https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/05/how-the-xbox-one-draw...
in the same way that nintendo thought it was smart to ignore online gaming for some 15 years, sure. It was true for a while. Until it wasnt
MS isn't doing this because it's immediately profitable. They feel it's the future, and they can iron out the technical issues. They want to be in the forefront when that arrives instead of playing catchup.
Also, more obviously: Gamepass is on Android and Android isn't playing those games natively. It's another way to target the mobile market.
Khan has lost 2 major cases recently, which isn’t a good look for her tenure so far. I don’t see how this case is recoverable considering how poorly it’s gone so far. With the EUs backing and the short time table, this deal seems essentially approved.
Khan is doing the right thing for the consumers here, and we can only hope that she perseveres.
Am I totally off base here? Can anyone explain to me why this case is so critical?
Again -- am I thinking about this wrong? What is the consumer harm that could result from the moving of IP from one company to another? A truly dedicated fan has to buy a different console to play their favorite game? Non-truly dedicated fans play one of the hundreds of other FPS games on the market that work with their console of choice?
There is always phones and PC for "open platform" at least.
When (tech) corporations are too big, I can think of many ways it can cause destruction to society. Only have to look at Facebook in the 2016 election. And tech companies will continue to grow, and become too big to fail, unless reigned upon as with past crises, like with banks. Only this time, they have all your information, can surveil you, etc, and with AI pretty soon.
Sure. Becuase they aren't even a monopoly in the gaming space to begin with. If you could simply outspend to become a major gaming competitor, Amazon should be #1 by now.
It's clearly not that simple so I'm not concerned about Sony suddenly declining. And meanwhile, Nintendo sits in its own throne above Sony/MS as if it's watching two children on a playground.
> I can think of many ways it can cause destruction to society. Only have to look at Facebook in the 2016 election.
Do you really think a loosely historical shooter game most people use to compete against one another will be used to control information for national elections? I simply don't see it, but who knows?
Even if so: the big issue with that comparison is that your grandparents aren't playing COD. Mine were on FB around that time.
Then play a different game.
If at some point consumers have to pay more than they would in a more competitive market, how is that not harm? If you believe that this is a move that will result in less consumer choice and more possibility for MS to extract more $$$$, then you don't like it.
No one HAS to pay for entertainment. It's a pure luxury. There's tons of things you can do with your free time besides playing video games (let alone brand-new AAA console titles): go outside, take a hike, play an instrument, take up a hobby, socialize, learn to cook, write your own software, I could go on and on. You can even do other forms of entertainment with your time: watch a movie or TV series, watch YouTube, watch a sports game, actually play in a sports game, play retro video games on archive.org or in an emulator, etc. All these things compete with (modern Activision) video games for time.
Of course not. They'd just play another game, or watch a movie or something.
If someone wants to play video games, they can do it for free on archive.org, and all they need is a web browser.
Because it's not a material good that gets in the way of my ability to live. And I say that despite working in entertainment. If a dam breaks down or is owned by some coporate entity that means people may not have access to water.
If Disney owns every single videgame/movie/music/etc and I detest Disney... I find some other pasttime. Hell, maybe I just focus more on foreign media. Sucks for my work but I can find a new job outside of the Mouse. It's a relative minor impact.
>If at some point consumers have to pay more than they would in a more competitive market, how is that not harm?
that's my exact issue. If I can't pay for insulin, I die. if I can't afford COD 2025... what? I don't get to play a video game? Is that "harm" in the traditional sense?
> If you believe that this is a move that will result in less consumer choice and more possibility for MS to extract more $$$$, then you don't like it.
Me not liking something =/= harm. I don't like mushrooms but I wouldn't say they harm me. I just don't like the texture or taste.
The last Call of Duty game crossed a billion dollars in 10 days
Microsoft is also getting ready to eat Steam’s lunch for a while on the PC side. Will that be allowed to go through?
Why not? What would it matter to the players on these consoles? Is demand for certain titles so price insensitive that Microsoft could then jack up the price by 100% and people would still buy them? Even if that's true (it's almost certainly not) the barriers to entry in the video game business are extremely low, so this would just create an enormous opportunity and pissed off consumers would jump to a newly created platform.
The gaming business, sure. The rest of Sony is still HQ'd in Japan and in fact manages many semi-needed and needed busineses, so there's zero chance MS buys Sony as a whole.
>Microsoft is also getting ready to eat Steam’s lunch for a while on the PC side
Didn't go too well last decade. Best of luck this time.
If Microsoft is ever in a position where a single merger will materially threaten to catapult them over Sony or Nintendo, then that would be the time to block the deal. In the meantime, I would prefer if the FTC doesn't kill off deals because someday, in the far distant future, the companies involved may be in a more dominant position.
If anything, blocking this deal does nothing but protect Sony's already dominant position from one of their sole competitors making up even a small amount of ground.
> Stormgate® is a _free-to-play_ real-time strategy PC game...
This is especially bad for multiplayer where you need high player counts so people can get into matches quick. Indie multiplayer games HAVE to be free or very inexpensive.
But I'm definitely down for MS to release another great RTS title.
Most likely, it will: 1. First, be good for consumers short-term as MS floods the market with high quality cheap content. 2. Next, be bad for the games industry medium term as their product gets devalued and only the biggest winner-take-all free to play games can compete vs. the value of bundled content 3. Next, be bad for gaming employees and entrepreneurs as the value of their roles gets squeezed and the nature of working in the industry become more constrained and formulaic 4. Finally, end up bad for consumers when the quality and variety of viable gaming products declines.
Sadly, the FTC and CMA chose to base their cases on a bunch of abject nonsense, so I'm grateful that the FTC has rightfully lost the crummy case that it made. And the CMA is also about to rightfully lose / surrender next.
But the key words of my take are "most likely". Games market changes too much to make long term predictions about. The countervailing forces are increasingly cheaper and easier creator tools, as well as the rising difficulty of maintaining a meaningful hardware edge.
From the public policy perspective, it's much more urgent to come up with meaningful and sound legal doctrines against excessive market power than it is to litigate speculative crap based on the optics of resisting big price tags. Lina Khan's performative career boosterism has been a huge failure because she's just as greedy and anti-social as every stereotype about corporate management. But I have faith that a framework which doesn't rely on spectacle and punditry can be found. The EU is trailblazing in that area where the US and UK are still completely primitive.
But there already is competition? FPSs and aren't exactly a dead genre.
I'm not sure if they'd be willing to do so for the game assets (the room/item descriptions/etc) – it would remove one of the main legal barriers to a competitor creating their own game set in the Zork universe. The Fortran 77 version of Zork has long been available under a "non-commercial use only" license, so they might be willing to release the game assets under such a license too (or maybe a more modern equivalent such as CC-BY-NC or CC-BY-NC-SA)
Having a public domain or MIT licensed Dungeon/Zork would allow to fix bugs and not worrying about licenses on any Linux/BSD distro.
The TOPS-20 versions of ZILCH (and ZAP) don't seem to be available.
The ITS version of ZILCH from MIT has been recovered, but (from what I understand) it is an earlier version, and the TOPS-20 version which Infocom used later isn't publicly available, and that later version had added features.
In any case, its copyright status is murky, Microsoft could clean up that murkiness.
This places it among the fastest selling video games of all time (https://vgsales.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_fastest-selling_vide...) so yes, it’s just sour grapes from you.
I suspect most developers are also doing this. No harm to Windows there.
Maybe it's the Xbox getting left behind?
Maybe they are just worried about the long game of Proton eventually eroding MS's share? But this looks more like propping up Xbox and Gamepass than Windows losing share (at least short term).
I think the reason is much simpler and smaller scale: Microsoft has always been behind in the gaming space and a huge 3rd party company with valuable IPs can bolster some incentive to buy Xbox and even PC's. It also further gives value to gamepass which seems to be their big focus this generation.
Microsoft buying ATVI will net them ownership over one of the most important game IPs of the last three console generations.
The only way this decision makes any sense is that the courts are somehow thinking that 10 years is long enough and things will be different by the time MS is in the position to tilt the deck to their favour by making parts of or the entirety of this franchise a platform exclusive.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is already 16 years old, so the courts are likely wrong as this franchise clearly has remarkable staying power to still be this relevant.
Activision is a terrible company whose iron grip on their beloved IP (bought from Blizzard and Infinity Ward) has been absolutely stifling to the industry. They are almost singlehandedly responsible for everything that sucks about gaming now.
It's more like if MD had bought Boeing. One can only dream.
The objective of business is to win, but if a business is too dominant, then they have the ability to extort customers.
I don't see how customer extortion is born out of this. It's fair and in the spirit of a healthy ecosystem.
Shouldn’t Microsoft build a compelling cloud gaming service that both customers want to pay for, and publishers want to publish on? Microsoft should build good gaming hardware and services, and people buy them based on the merits of those products rather than acquiring companies just to prop up their efforts and otherwise restrict consumers.
Consumers aren't being restricted.
Quite the opposite, Microsoft purchasing this IP is causes them to release those games on more platforms. All activision games with be on Gamepass, steam, as well consoles when that wasn't automatically the case before.
The rule expecting good faith arguments is entirely moot if corporate players can sic their squads of goons on social media.
Almost every comment is something like: "Well, big corporations gonna be corporating, what you gonna do?" or "MS is bad, but are they as bad as [Insert distraction here]" or "I love this move, please promote me microsoft."
And here people will still believe this isn't happening, when the evidence is clear to see for anyone with a slightly skeptical mind.
I'm not impressed with Sony's tantrums over this, they've been throwing money around for exclusivity for years, ranging from exclusive content in major titles (Destiny and CoD have often been 'definitive' on PlayStation) to outright title exclusivity.
I'm probably not a good source of opinion on this, Acti-Blizz has become a toxic company that doesn't really make games I like anymore, and I resent them for holding Heretic and Hexen hostage even during this renaissance of throw back FPSs.. there's too much money to be made elsewhere for them to do something like that.. maybe I'm being suckered but seeing Phil in that Hexen tshirt made me hopeful. I'm also an old and bitter Warcraft RTS fan, they ignored RTS Warcraft entirely for years after WoW became their focus, and when they finally did give Warcraft III attention they completely destroyed the community and arguably made the game worse for everybody. They could have done absolutely nothing and everything would be better!
In short, unless I was a big fan of their current offerings (I am not) I don't see how Microsoft could possibly make things worse, so I'm slightly optimistic about the changes this acquisition will bring. Worst case scenario the dumpster fire gets bigger. I'm sure people who love the current offerings have very different feelings about this.
I'd look at what they've done with the Minecraft IP since buying it - main game gets no love, infrequent updates, etc., whilst they churn out side-projects like Dungeons and load up Bedrock with monetisation. For sure, it's not "worse" but it's a million miles away from what should have been under good ownership.
>it's a million miles away from what should have been under good ownership.
Notch didn't exactly age well in the last 12 years or so, so I'm not sure if that's a good example of "it couldn't be worse".
Definitely. It is an unoptimised shambles of a mess - mods can improve the performance by sometimes multiple orders of magnitude.
A simple(ish) block game should not chug at sub-60fps rates on a gaming PC when I can run something like Just Cause 2 at a solid 4K60 with all the graphics turned up.
> Notch didn't exactly age well in the last 12 years or so
True and fair.
It's all we wanted from Warcraft III. They shut down the existing game and replaced it with the remaster, which had a significant number of previously present features absent or broken. Even now years later it's a zombie product that has essentially been left to die.
Again I'm not in the loop on Minecraft but I would be very surprised if Microsoft has mistreated it anywhere near as badly as Blizzard has Warcraft III.
On 5 May 2023, the CMA made an Interim Order pursuant to section 81 of the Act preventing each of Microsoft and Activision and all members of their Groups of Interconnected Bodies Corporate from acquiring in the other any interest conferring control within the meaning of section 26 of the Act
[0] https://www.gov.uk/cma-cases/microsoft-slash-activision-bliz...
[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6465ec16e1407...
https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/11/23791149/microsoft-activi...
The merger has been approved by EU and now US regulators.
The UK market might be small enough compared to the US and the EU that Microsoft and Activision might find it worthwhile to just leave the UK console game market if they had to choose between that and not being able to complete the merger.
I played FO:NV and 3, again and again, but everything after it has been a doubled down poor experience
honestly this create an economic boon upon closure more tax from sales win-win
but if the acquisition doesn't succeed it is fine too Activision is in a good stance as its titles have been doing better than most
When, not if Call of Duty and many others Activision Blizzard has goes Xbox and PC exclusive, some people are going to get pies and eggs on their faces that is for sure. Also more consolidation of the gaming industry isn't good in the long run as it clearly opens the door for the big players to buy up even more assets. I can clearly see Microsoft buy EA, Sega and Square Enix now as a example.
I can't play Pokemon on my PC or Gran Turismo on my Xbox or WoW on my PS5. What will change "very bad for end consumer in long term"?
(1) https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/28/23777003/microsoft-square...
But as long as you throw enough money at the judges and bribing regulators, perhaps you do get away with monopolistic practices. Microsoft will never change and cannot be trusted.
They will continue their horizontal integration of games studios and apply their lock in with their game-pass platform over a so-called 10 year pinky promise which they can make all other new games exclusive anyway afterwards.
At the start of last generation, XBOX decided to shot themselves [1] and announce that the XBOX One would be an always online media (not gaming) machine that would require itself to phone home frequently or it wouldn't even work at all offline during vacations. They spent more time trying to sell you a media brick with features no was or is asking for to this day, instead of showing games which is the whole point of a console (Sony capitalized on this by showcasing nothing but games). They asked 100$ more than Sony's console ($499vs$399), and iirc, the console had weaker hardware which lead to many games running worse on it.
Over the years they've also destroyed all their first party studio franchises besides Forza which is still going strong, this includes Halo which has been more misses than hits in the last decade plus. I'm in no way saying they weren't commercial hits, you can sell well and still be a bad or broken product (Cyberpunk 2077) that ends up poisoning the well.
XBOX first party games are also notorious for their predatory monetization, just as much if not more so than EA or ACTIVISION Blizzard, does anyone even remember how bad GoW5 was?
Another thing people seem to be forgetting is that XBOX isn't just trying to acquire ACITIVSION Blizzard. They've been on a shopping spree, including the likes of ZeniMax Media [2] which included subsidiaries such as Bethesda Softworks, Arkane Studios, id Software... as well as other solo studios like Obsidian Entertainment known for amazing RPG classics, Ninja Theory behind Hellblade, as well as plenty of other studios since 2018 [3], please check for yourself and see what they're doing.
They've shown that they don't care about you, the consumer, time and time again, willingly putting out titles such as Redfall at full price (70€£$) without a care. They've shown that they'll immediately pull games out of Playstation [4][5] so that they can compete with Sony by using brute force, hell, I'm sure if allowed, they would've tried to acquire Sony Interactive Entertainment from the Sony Group, if not the whole group itself. (Sony Group 113.89 billion USD vs Microsoft 2.47 trillion USD)
Lets talk about cloud gaming, the "Future" of gaming. Gamepass is a good deal, yes, but like every SAAS model, it means you don't own anything, not digitally, not physically, you can't even modify files, and prices are subject to change, and change they do [6]. Now think about that, you can't modify files... If you play more than 2-3 games a year, I'm sure one of the first things you've done is mess around with the .ini file because the in-game menu is lacking settings. I'm sure you've had to install mods because the game was broken at launch and it was the modding community who fixed it, or you simply wanted mods. What happens in a few years when they do what Netflix or HBO does, and they remove games they don't want to pay licensing for?[7] or when they terminate an online game and you have no way of making your own private servers to keep it alive? Right now, a lot of games that came out before 2010 simply can't be legally purchased[8], this problem gets worse the older the titles are, especially if you go into the retro game list. But they hold their IP rights, which means you can't even legally distribute ROMs or else you run the risk of companies like Nintendo coming after you.
Finally, it's Microsoft. They aren't known for their pro-consumer policies. They're known for being ruthless and exploitative. Windows 11 is filled with ads and forces you to use their products with shady behavior such as making you jump through hops to set a different browser as the default. The XBOX division is no different and this tribalism surrounding consoles (PSvsXBOX) which leads to people publicly defending a trillion dollar company online because the FTC is fighting to preserve the consumer (them) is worrying.
EDIT: Forgot to mention Age of Empire 2 Definitive Edition as another game that is doing quite well, although AoE4 isn't quite as well, and was also initially a Windows Store only game, which further cements the fact that they don't control the PC market the way they want, Steam does.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrvE3B5Rz6A [2] https://news.microsoft.com/features/microsoft-finalizes-acqu... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_Game_Studios [4] https://gamerant.com/redfalls-ps5-cancelation-negative-impac... [5] https://www.gamesradar.com/starfield-ps4-ps5/ [6] https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/21/23768400/microsoft-xbox-s... [7] https://www.npr.org/2023/03/17/1164146728/why-are-dozens-of-... [8] https://www.gamedeveloper.com/culture/study-finds-nearly-eve...
I don't think anyone forgot, it's simply irrelevant. For one reason or another, they are 3rd place so these arguments against being a monopoly falls flat. As well as all the "company bad" arguments being made. If "company bad" was a sufficient argument no acquisition would be made ever.
But these aren't up to public opinion, it's up to courts.
> a media brick with features no was or is asking for to this day
nah, people really wanted those features... but MS was beat to the punch by much cheapter set top boxes. Then the rise of smart Tv's sealed the deal (even if the hardware for those absolutely suck). Bad foresight there, especially since they were promising a cable TV show for Halo in 2013, around the time Netflix was establishing itself as a major force.
>does anyone even remember how bad GoW5 was?
No, not really. GOW5 jumped off the Lootbox train extremely fast (<2 months after release or something). So EA/Activision/Epic was in the forefront there. Probably one of the smarter moves MS made. MS may have been bad, but they either had good PR or the competition was simply that much worse.
Practically every game they’ve released or worked on the past 5 years has failed. Halo Infinite might literally be the biggest flop in entertainment history.
Because of Azure they’re able to absorb these losses and continue to consolidate and eat the competiton.
There’s tons of examples in the past of gaming studios that underperform and end up downsizing - Sega is a great example.
Meanwhile, Sony and Nintendo continue to release quality titles knowing they have no infinite money backing.
It’s one thing for Microsoft to continue to pump money into Xbox (look at Amazon and Alexa). It’s another for them to simply purchase the competition.
If Microsoft is really subsidizing a failing business, they should be allowed to do so as long as they find it reasonable. I don't think Sony has the right to demand a favorable status-quo for their consoles if their competitors double down on software investments.
Between powerhouses like CoD, the mobile division of both King's legacy titles like Candy Crush, and newer ones like Diablo Immortal, and Blizzard's Diablo 4 + WoW being very well received, the concern is primarily that instead of making better first party titles, Xbox just wants to acquire exclusive rights to already successful studios + publishers like Bethesda + now ABK. (Weather or not this will actually happen or not is anyone's guess. I'm assuming they will indeed make the titles exclusive).
The GP seems to be talking about how Microsoft's Xbox is the one being bailed out by Microsoft Azure / enterprise licensing allowing Xbox to continue to fumble with first party titles without being forced out of the market.
IMO the main reason for the uproar is that Microsoft is clearly leveraging their immense market share in the enterprise world to buy out the competition by acquiring studios that were formerly multi-platform and making them exclusive, which absolutely does seem to be anti-competitive and anti-consumer. (To be clear, I think Sony spending a ton of money on exclusivity contracts with Square Enix, etc. is also anti-consumer).
[0] - https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/ATVI/activision-bl....
Anti-consumer behavior is not "losing money". Instead, anti-consumer behavior would be if Microsoft shuts down competition in some way, such that they are the monopoly market leader, and consumers can't buy from else where.
This isn't anywhere close to being true, given that microsoft is not the monopoly market leader in the gaming space. That award goes to Sony.
And why not? If Wal-Mart gets a failing games division, I don't see why it should be stopped from buying Activision, either.
The fact is the only way Microsoft becomes competitive again is for the industry to switch to streaming games. Thats why they’re buying all these studios. If Microsoft isn’t successful in the switch to streaming games, they are out of the gaming business cause they’ve lost the console wars and there’s no recovering at this point unless Sony significantly fucks up.
That is, for many of the studios that Sony has funded, it is easy to see a series of games that nobody else was willing to place bets on. For the ones that Microsoft is buying... Seems very very different.
Who’s to say Microsoft won’t continue to subsidize the Xbox division? They’ve failed at every turn this past decade and yet continue to get a blank check.
Half the reason that Microsoft has been buying game studios is because Sony has been buying game studios. Sony has even bought a game studio that Microsoft already bought and sold.
Among others, Sony's bought: Psygnosis (Lemmings), Incognito (Twisted Metal), Zipper Interactive (SOCOM), Sigil (Everquest), Evolution (WRC, Motorstorm), Bungie (Destiny), Polyphony (Gran Turismo), Santa Monica (God of War), Bend (Days Gone, Syphon Filter), Naughty Dog (Crash Bandicoot, Jak and Daxter, Uncharted, The Last of Us), Guerilla (Killzone, Horizon), Media Molecule (Little Big Planet), Sucker Punch (Ghost of Tsushima), Insomniac (Spyro, Ratchet & Clank, Spider-Man)... they basically have built their entire "first party" game catalog off of the companies they've acquired.
Bungee and maybe a few others are the exception, with the bungie purchase looking like a reaction to the activision purchase.
You are right about the exclusives, they have not had anything that has really grabbed peoples attention long term for a long while. Halo Infinite felt like it was everywhere for about 2 weeks and then completely forgotten about. But others like God of War on PS have had legs for years.
The PC gaming market is thriving thanks to Steam and indies.
Playstation is doing well. Switch is doing great.
Microsoft? Aside from providing Windows and DirectX, they're basically invisible. Xbox is just a cheap wannabe PC with no great games. It's a wonder they've supported it for this long. Maybe this acquisition gives them a fighting chance against Sony and Nintendo.
It's not like Activision and Blizzard are even particularly beloved, just pumping out endless sequels. They're steady but relatively soulless cash machines that don't really innovate anymore anyway.
Having Microsoft in control might improve their internal cultures, maybe make Blizzard games finally available on Steam, get more and Bethesda Xbox games on GeForce Now, etc. Maybe even make more games cross platform and with good controller support. Those all seem great. Meanwhile the real innovation will continue to come from indies while the behemoths just keep pumping out new graphics (which are often just Unreal anyway, which is again not Microsoft).
Microsoft is just too minor to be dominant in modern gaming, and Activision is a has-been that just keeps making filler titles. It's not some great loss to the industry. Now if someone acquired Valve, that would be a tragedy...
For now. Fortunes change pretty quick in the console world. One generation you are on top, the next you are struggling for second place.
MS buying Activision is bad. This gives MS a long term advantage. It signals to companies like Sony and Nintendo that they shouldn’t bother competing since they can never counter the buying out of huge publishers as they aren’t worth 2.47 trillion USD like Microsoft.
Has Microsoft has any major successes since Halo and Fable, years and years ago? They're desperate for games. Activision isn't going to suddenly make the dominant overnight. If anything, it would barely help stop the bleeding. Microsoft is so far behind right now it's not funny. I'd be way more afraid of competition dying because Microsoft gave up on it rather than buying Activision.
3rd party support plays a big part in a console’s success. MS is effectively buying out one of the largest 3rd party studios denying its competitors their support.
Buying up one of the biggest publishers though. What’s Sony and Nintendo, whose combined market cap is less than 7% of MS’s, suppose to do? I don’t see how allowing “big money Pay 2 Win without a fight” in anyway benefits the consumer.
How much of that MC is solely X-box and how much do MS , Sony, and Nintendo own of that respectively? MS studios has been struggling. Activision also has been struggling to land some hits and only recently with Diablo 4 they have got some relief. So buying Activision is not a golden ticket.
Honestly I would cherish the moment. It would be the most likely path to actually seeing HL3 released. The one time the filthy capitalists manage to do a good thing...
Valve to me has become a pathetic, rent-seeking platform owner. No clue why the gaming community still holds them in such regard. Linux support and not being publicly traded must be a massive deal for some gamers I suppose. The indie developers who launch on their platform are much more deserving of your attention & praise. The guys who developed battle bit have done more to improve my gaming experience than anything all of Valve has done since Portal 2 was released over a decade ago.
The thought of seeing HL3 actually released makes me a little nervous. When I look at great game franchises that had a large time gap before another sequel is released, it seems pretty rare for that sequel not to be terrible.
Yes, I want HL3 as much as anyone, but Alyx was pretty cool (still one of the better VR demos), the Steam Deck is innovative in its own way (and Aperture Desk Job is a fun HL universe spinoff), GeForce Now integration is really useful for some of us, Cloud Save is awesome, etc. Not to mention the sales... because of Steam sales and resellers (isthereanydeal.com) games are far more affordable than they ever were before, especially compared to the consoles.
The platform is WORTH paying rent for. If you want to see how bad it could be otherwise, it's not a hypothetical... Epic, Windows Games Marketplace (or whatever it's called these days), GOG, etc. are all far inferior in terms of ease of use, features, selection, pricing, etc. As someone who's been PC gaming since Lode Runner and Commander Keen, Steam is by far the best thing that's happened to it in three decades. It was even more transformative than 3DFX or DirectX in terms of the quality and quantity of games made available to gamers.
Heck, I’m still mad that Microsoft caused DeusEx 2 to be downscaled and dumbed down for the XBox.
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