I’m all for this merger. Maybe Microsoft can use it as leverage against Sony to avoid needless exclusivity
My other stance is that Activision is so shitty to its workers and customers, let’s give someone else a try
See, I agree with this angle, but at the same time it kind of feels like a Pyrrhic victory.
Microsoft gaming strategy does benefit gamers. Which counteracts the problem of losing a competitor.
Microsoft doesnt care about profits on single products much compared to the grand strategy they follow. For example AoE4 and all the aoe franchise doesnt really give a lot of profit Microsoft would care about, yet they keep investing and updating it bc they like it and like the strategic benefit.
Not caring as strictly about profit means you dont get as many greedy microtransactions and more balanced approaches. The game pass is also a really cheap deal if you play variety
No subscription deal is ever a good financial decision long term and companies know that. Most people keep their subscriptions running and will end up paying more long term.
That’s not even getting into the “ownership” vs renting aspect.
Why? Microsoft hasnt been pushing for it like Sony has. Sony has been crazy anti competitive.
Part of the problem is that since Sony is so heavily invested in exclusives, if Microsoft doesn’t have any exclusives and all their games also come out of Playstation, that’s incentive for people to purchase a PS5 over an Xbox because they know they’ll get all of the games that both Sony and Microsoft make. So even if Microsoft doesn’t want to do exclusives, they kind of have to if they want to keep people from just purchasing their competitor’s console.
Future Bethesda games are exclusive. They weren’t going to be, but they are now.
Well this is a good way to filter out how many Sony fanboys are here lol
Capital wins again. If only the FTC didn’t sit on its ass for the last 40 years, maybe such market consolidation wouldn’t be allowed and normalized.
Also shout-out to this comm. The Beehaw community seems delighted. You can sometimes really tell which instances skew toward leftists vs liberals
The fact that it was challenged at all is a huge step in the right direction. Couple of years ago, the FTC wouldn’t even bat an eye with these mergers. The new chair, Lina Khan seems to be determined to reduce the power of monopolies.
Which is a good thing, if this isn’t obvious.
The problem lies with the complete out of touch judges now.
If only the FTC didn’t sit on its ass for the last 40 years
That’s more on the money than you think. Microsoft mostly won because the FTC didn’t clamp down on Sony being anticompetitive which “forced” Microsoft to make these acquisitions. This situation is bad, but the alternative with Sony exclusivity deals all over the place was worse.
No I think this is worse. It’s not a deal. These are all first party studios now essentially, through nothing but the purchasing power of a trillion dollar company. They will and can be as locked as Microsoft prefers.
There were 360 deals before PS4/PS5 deals. There were Xbox One deals even during Sony dominance, like Tomb Raider. Sony is just one player, but the others are not angels.
Nothing here stops those deals from continuing.
What has happened is that the second or third largest third party publisher’s studios and “IP” now belong to a first party publisher.
And I predict more acquisitions, and thus consolidation, will come from Sony.
The title is a little misleading. This ruling is only regarding the preliminary injunction. There is still an ongoing suit with the FTC and we will need to wait for that to be resolved. However, knowing how these things go, Microsoft will make a ton of promises about creating jobs, keeping their content available to everyone, and agreeing to play fair. They will get approval and immediately turn around and terminate a ton of jobs, start making things exclusive, and backtrack on their promises. Then…nothing will happen. There will be no repercussions. Rinse and repeat.
Thank the GOP for basically ridding the US of antitrust law, which is now basically no longer a thing.
contemporary democrats are not any better, they make hella frequent concessions to anti-competitive business practices under the guise of licensing or stimulus
This is why US democrats are considered center-right compared to the rest of the world.
I think they’re still there, just haven’t been trotted out in recent history. And mergers keep getting approved.
The last merger that got blocked was almost 50 years ago, I believe. So yeah…it’s probably dead.
The guys who claim capitalism works because a free market will create better things through competition. Guess they weren’t so much for the competition stuff and just became puppets for corporations. We also have it completely legal to openly bribe politicians which makes zero fucking sense, except we call it lobbying so it somehow becomes okay.
Only thing worse than free market capitalism is state sponsored. Decades of the fed flooding the big banks with capital to loan, taxes taken from everyone but the largest corps, and regulatory capture (see copy right for this topic), and we get corporations that demand difficult anti trust actions just to slow down.
Only pure liberals think leaving the free market by itself with minimal regulation is a good thing. Capital attracts capital and becomes basically a snowball.
But is the solution a market controlled by a centralized entity? You just pointed out politicians can also be corrupted. So… Giving more power to an entity that can be corrupted is the solution?
The problem is corruption. Any system you can propose can be fucked up by corruption. The justice system, politicians and government can be corrupted under any system because they are human.
If I’m wrong, just propose any system and I’ll tell you how it crumbles because of corruption.
It’s my understanding that Microsoft can now close the deal and acquire ABK before the FTC trial would even take place (as soon as July 18th, though unlikely given the new UK CMA negotiations). What happens to the suit if the merger is already complete?
Probably a fine that’s simply justified as “operating costs”. It’s actually kinda bullshit, they shouldn’t be allowed to buy up all the NA competition. Next is probably EA. Thankfully Sony saw this coming and started investing in new studios and IP.
I’d be pretty surprised if MS is allowed to purchase another huge publisher. Zenimax was pretty small, but ABK is huge. But who knows at this point…
How does one bring Teddy Roosevelt back from the grave? I’m uh…asking for a friend? Yeah. Let’s go with that.
You can “rah rah” about exclusivity all day long. What needs to be acknowledged is how huge this is in terms of developers under one company. As far as I can think of, there’s never been anything like it. I don’t think it’s gonna be for the better, I mean this is the same company responsible for this
GFWL was one of the worst attempts to compete with Steam I’ve ever seen, and also one of the worst software experiences I’ve ever had. I never got more than an hour into GTA4 because of it and how intolerant of bullshit software I am. Valve should have put their feet down back then and said “no secondary launcher dependencies”.
Game pass is OK in terms of value if you play lots of games, but the software it uses is not great, despite being leagues better than GFWL. Windows also sucks, but I’m stuck with it due to work :/
