Brad Smith used Microsoft's $1B lobbying machine to win Activision battle | Hacker News Reader

Brad Smith used Microsoft's $1B lobbying machine to win Activision battle

ft.com

36 pointsbelter18 comments

Honest question: Why do people think Microsoft buying Activision is bad?

because it will reduce competition (even if it's to the detriment of the consumer) - particularly when it comes to cloud gaming.

msft is acquiring both horizontally (compared to their existing inhouse studios - notably their previous acquisition of zenimax/bethesda) and vertically (as activision/blizzard/king are the biggest developer of games for xbox and playstation).

the plan is 2 fold: 1. short term - instead of competing with sony on securing exclusivity, ensure exclusivity by ownership 2. long term - bolster xbox cloud gaming by ensuring that every major game exists on the platform (ideally exclusively)

the idea is that once you have a suprior catalog of games and a working subscription platform, you can boil your customers like frogs via price increases / ads / etc and that they will have no where to go because the games they want to play are exclusive to your service. with this acquisition msft is acquiring some of the most valuable ip in gaming, the development talent behind that api, and the audiences and communities that power it all and locking them down to xbox cloud gaming.

Who cares about cloud gaming? I’m not trolling I’m serious I can’t see it becoming a real thing anytime soon, Google gave it a very good try and it flopped.

The next XBox refresh is rumored to lack an optical drive. So you buy your games from the Microsoft Store. Or download them from the Microsoft Store with a Gamepass subscription.

That’s how you dominate “cloud” gaming— it becomes the only option you give customers to purchase games.

At least for me - I never took stadia seriously because google was always going to cancel it. There’s no point investing energy in new google products.

It may still be true that cloud gaming is not an interesting product, but google’s failure to enter it isn’t proof of that.

Any consolidation leads to redundancies (job loss). Instead of 2 director/vp/svp's of marketing and all their reports and their reports, you just need 1. Apply that to most business areas (accounting, finance, tech, etc) in a company and it tends to push wages down across the board.

Also, fewer competitors leads to a less interesting market. Imagine the NFL with just 4 teams.

As far as Microsoft/Activision goes, it's potentially a good thing, but just because Activision was also made of acquisitions and drive for profit came at the cost of lower quality of their releases, IMO. Microsoft might reinvigorate Activision/Blizzard's IP.

Fewer competitors also means fewer organizations to service for vendors. This has a huge long-term impact on the economy and local job markets as it means fewer firms being formed.

That's a really good point. If you are a vendor, you can sell to mom and pops, grocery stores, Walmart, Amazon, Costco, etc. Once mom and pops are gone, you are limited to who you can sell to. When that happens, the people you can sell too have a lot more leverage against you.

In terms of vendors, consolidation is like a black hole. The more consolidation, the bigger the black hole and the more vendors crushed by the gravity.

Robust competition leads to better products for customers, and better jobs for employees.

The company will do meaningful work, have better pricing, and employees will have more customer focus and less office politics.

"The software company has amassed “one of the largest armies of corporate diplomats that we’ve ever seen”, said Manas Chawla, a researcher who has studied the company. “They include policy officials working on everything from how to regulate artificial intelligence to protecting elections and tackling cyberwarfare against sovereign states,” he said."

"The UN efforts are part of an operation under Smith that costs more than $1bn a year to run, according to people familiar with the company. The groups inside Microsoft reporting to him include legal, corporate and government affairs, accounting for what Microsoft describes as around 2,000 “professionals”. His organisation also includes a digital crimes unit and teams working on identifying cyber attacks and misinformation campaigns."

And that is why to have true capitalism Microsoft should have been broken up a long time back.

They almost did in the early 00s, but unfortunately their lawyers were just as good then and republicans controlled the justice department.

For capitalism to work long-term there needs to be regulations (this was even included in Smith's "The Wealth of Nations"). But in the US people are incredibly hostile to any form of government actions, hence unfettered capitalism will continue and corporations will steadily grow into monopolies.

capitalism -> competition

Consolidation and abuse of capital to influence governing bodies, is the result of true capitalism (and almost any other system, ironically).

that's called a trust and it needs to be disassembled

So, the technocracy can use its billions (trillions?) of dollars (in aggregate) of influence to continue to perpetuate technology which buries us in distraction and dopamine hits and furthers the capitalist agenda, yet we are unable to amass the same kind of support and influence to tackle the existential problems with which we are confronted globally. Speaks volumes on the state of our humanity. Why do we let these people continue to drive the bus when it is not in our collective, long-term interest?

If you think global warming is bad, just imagine if your kingdom were invaded by a horde of orcs!

https://archive.ph/ZPWWZ

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