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Comment by AirMax98 | Hacker News Reader

God damn man. How is this not an antitrust violation? The only answer is that we live in truly corrupt times. What is our answer to this?

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Because it really isn't a violation of antitrust as is currently defined.

Linda Khan's article here is, IMO, one of the best overviews of why: https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-parado...

What's frustrating is that this requires legislative change, which, given the current political climate, seems like a sisyphean task.

We'll just keep rolling through the 21st century with horribly outdated laws on every front, because the government can't function well enough to change them

Microsoft doesn't have anything close to a monopoly on games. In terms of sales and reviewer scores, most of the top games weren't produced by Activision or other Microsoft studios. The only recent release I'm aware of was Starfield, and that was panned for failing to meet expectations, achieving under 88 on Metacritic.

How is buying up two of the biggest game studios not anti-competitive behavior? The apologism in this comment is hilarious. I hope your getting paid for shilling this hard.

i mean, europe didn't think it was a monopoly or close to anti-trust. same with all other countries.

hell, CMA only complained about the cloud business.

FTC tried to do something, but failed so spectacularly that even the judge had to say "you have to defend customers, not sony".

Because the person you responded to just answered that question?

It is because Microsoft isn't anywhere close to being a monopoly in games.

You could have just read the comment to get the answer to your question.

It's not a monopoly but I think it's fair to express frustration towards the lack of legislation preventing what's clearly anti-competitive behavior. It doesn't seem very helpful for people to continually state what the current laws are as if that makes this better somehow.

How is it stopping anyone from coming in and competing? It's not like they're selling games at a loss to kill the competition.

They’re giving them away for a small monthly fee with their console subscription. How the hell is this any different, if not worse, than the anti-competitive behavior that Microsoft was brought to court for in the 90s?

So you think that Microsoft is going to run their gaming business at a loss until all the other gaming studios go out of business, then jack up the prices?

If not, I don't see what the problem is.

It isn't anti-completive to simply sell a product for a better price unless you are dumping (selling under cost to drive competitors out of business).

> So you think that Microsoft is going to run their gaming business at a loss until all the other gaming studios go out of business, then jack up the prices?

i wish people realize that king is probably earning more than activision and blizzard combined.

and guess what? king is a mobile app company, nothing to do with xbox's main business.

That's a really good point. It's also weird to talk about the customer impact of monopolies when the cash cow is garbage free to play games

> How the hell is this any different

it is significantly different because back then Microsoft was close to being a monopoly in the relevant market.

Thats the difference. Microsoft is not that in video games right now.

Giving stuff away for free or cheap and bundling is completely fine if the company doing it isn't even close to being a monopoly.

> than the anti-competitive behavior that Microsoft was brought to court for in the 90s?

The anti competitive behavior that they were brought to court for was not bundling.

Instead, it was for being close to a monopoly while also engaging in bundling.

Bundling is only anti-competitive if the company doing it is close to being a monopoly.

Show me where I mentioned the word monopoly. You can’t, because I said anti-competitive.

Ok, and it is not anti-competitive because microsoft isn't anywhere close to being a monopoly.

Thats the answer to the question. This answer was already given to you.

Why do you insist on throwing the red herring “monopoly?” You don’t have to be a monopoly to be anti-competitive. Again, Microsoft was not a “monopoly” in the 90s when they were trust busted.

> Why do you insist on throwing the red herring “monopoly?”

It is not a red herring.

Instead, it is the most important factor for determining if something is illegally anticompetitive.

* if a company does not have a large enough percentage of the market, then many actions become completely legal* <------ (hint. This is the central point and is completely uncontroversial)

> Again, Microsoft was not a “monopoly” in the 90s

It had over 70% of the relevant market.

According to court precedent ,that is absolutely within the definition of having monopoly power.

And Microsoft has no where close to that amount of monopoly power for anti trust laws to apply.

> You don’t have to be a monopoly to be anti-competitive.

You quite literally do have to have a large enough percentage of the market for something to be anti competitive.

If you do not have a large percentage of the market, then whole swaths of things are not illegal, that would be illegal if a large market share firm did the same action.

Is it literally a factor that determines if anti trust law applies.

This isn't controversial.

Feel free to look up all the information on the FTC website, if you actually care.

https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...

> Microsoft doesn't have anything close to a monopoly on games.

The whole monopoly argument doesn't work, we'll just end up with duopolies, or perhaps triopolies. See iOS vs Android.

What we need is an adjustment of the rules, where e.g. the top 10 companies instead of the top 1 company are treated as a monopoly from an antitrust point of view.

This will give consumers more to choose from.

You might be interested in reading about what defines a cartel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartel

I don't think we're anywhere near close to that in the videogame industry.

The most recent Microsoft Studios release was Forza Motorsport a few days ago, with the next big Activision thing being the perennial CoD next month. (Which as an aside is still coming to PS4/Xbox One)

I’m convinced we’ve always had corruption, it’s just seeing more of the light today.

I mention this to my Eastern European friends and they laugh at the level of corruption the US complains about (compared to what they’ve had for decades+)

> this to my Eastern European friends and they laugh at the level of corruption the US

These days I’m not that sure that the case (only talking about the Eastern European countries in the US)

But that's a big part of why the US is as successful as it is. A culture against corruption. It's very hard to get rid of it once it entrenches itself, which is why people complain about it.

Where is the corruption here? I agree that there are many corrupt parts of government, especially in procurement, and especially in regional and local governments, but in this specific case it's pretty clear that the law is on the side of Microsoft here.

What is the antitrust behavior here?

the antitrust behavior is two of the largest players in the gaming space combining. how is that going to promote competition? it's just going to make it easier for them to outspend and outlast and eventually ingest it's competition

Sony's gaming revenue is ~26 B

8 % of MSFT's revenue is from gaming = ~15 B

Nintendo 12 B

ABK 8 B

EA 7.5 B

( and that isn't including tencent and netease. i didn't bother trying to find figures for them but they are in the running here too )

So you're worried about them selling games at a loss until the other game studios go out of business?

Number 4 and 6 are merging to become number 3.

Microsoft has one of the two biggest gaming subscription services. They would like to see gaming be a subscription business. When they say, we will still sell Call of Duty on other platforms they don't say that they will give it away on GamePass.

What's wrong with subscriptions? It lets a distributor scrape off the excess profit. Games are a hit driven business. It sounds great when a platoform offers two or three times the cost of development to a developer, but the model won't really work unless some titles make like 10x. Listen to Jason Blum explain why Netfilx is terrible for independent film.

You will just see a lot less independent developers (not hobbyists) and small publishers. Maybe no one cares. I will probably be retired by then.

Microsoft produces video games. They acquired another company that produces video games. How is this antitrust?

The merger of two large entities in the same market is a pretty clear example of something that should raise antitrust concerns.

I disagree because Microsoft doesn't hold some unique barrier to entry into video game production the way they do an operating system.

You can argue that this specific case doesn't rise to the level that would actually result in anti-competitive results. My point was just that the merger of two large companies is the kind of thing that deserves scrutiny, because your comment implied that it couldn't even in theory have antitrust concerns.

Why? Two large corporations merging isn’t in itself antitrust. In some cases an industry is in decline and it makes a lot of sense for large companies to merge otherwise both might go out of business (clearly not what’s going on here, but just an example).

It did raise concerns and it was reviewed by multiple bodies around the world, with many concessions made. Do you believe every single review body got it wrong on the facts?

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