This is weird. The judge says that because there won’t be any anticompetitive effects in the next 10 years (because MS made a pinky promise), this merger is fine?
What about after those 10 years? What about anything not Call of Duty?
What about after those 10 years? What about anything not Call of Duty?
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.
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.
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.
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?)
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.
Tim has recently said he has the full source code to the original and the design doc to the planned sequel...