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Comment by TheCaptain4815 | Hacker News Reader

What a joke. Because Microsoft is now failing as a gaming company the past 10 years, they’ve been allowed to swallow up competiton.

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.

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It’s funny that you mention Sony considering almost all of their first titles are from studios they’ve bought over the last 15 years. I guess it’s fine when Sony did it in the past to get ahead of the competition but now when Microsoft is doing it, it’s anticompetitive.

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.

They lost the console wars because they released shit consoles with shit games. They were totally fine during the Xbox 360 era when they made excellent games.

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.

There is a difference in basically sponsoring the artistic abilities of a studio, versus buying one to shoulder out your competition, though. To pretend otherwise for Microsoft seems very disingenuous.

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.

Well that’s the idea, isn’t it? If you’re not doing well in your business you aren’t being anti-competitive by trying to buy your way back into the game. Hence, the decision to allow it.

Isn’t that practically the definition of “anti consumer”behavior - A company division being bailed out by another because of its ineptness?

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.

“Anti consumer” is a catch all phrase with no legal relevance that people use to describe whatever behavior they don’t like from companies. The issue here would be “anti competitive” or “anti trust”, the definitions of which the judge certainly is aware of.

No, that is not the definition of anti-consumer behavior.

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.

Anti-consumer behavior? I don't think so. Bailing out failing studios doesn't necessarily harm the consumer, and it's especially the case with dead-in-the-water studios like Activision-Blizzard. The alternative would be their corpse getting picked over by companies who want to buy up their IP, and that's certainly not what their consumers want.

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.

Activision-Blizzard-King is by no means a "failing studio" though. They are one of the most successful by nearly any metric. According to MacroTrends [0], "Activision Blizzard gross profit for the quarter ending March 31, 2023 was $1.718B, a 33.28% increase year-over-year."

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....

Because Sony is a tiny company, right?

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.

As someone said above “There is a difference in basically sponsoring the artistic abilities of a studio, versus buying one to shoulder out your competition”.

Bungee and maybe a few others are the exception, with the bungie purchase looking like a reaction to the activision purchase.

I completely get the point you are making but I wish I had a business that was "failing" like Xbox is. :P

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.

> What a joke. Because Microsoft is now failing as a gaming company the past 10 years, they’ve been allowed to swallow up competiton.

And why not? If Wal-Mart gets a failing games division, I don't see why it should be stopped from buying Activision, either.

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