Spoilers: "The contents of the message are redacted, but the plaintiffs say [...]"
The email may well prove that Microsoft has this plan, I certainly wouldn't put it past Microsoft. It is in the established nature of Microsoft to behave in such anti-competitive ways, the shoe fits. But when the plantiff is using circumstantial evidence to deduce what the email must have contained, I think it's quite a stretch to say the email "proves" anything.
The email is also from 2019. It might still be worthwhile evidence, but it wouldn't really pertain to the Activision deal in particular.
If someone at Microsoft had sent an email a month before the Activision deal saying, "we want to crush the next-gen Playstation," that could be evidence that the Activision deal is part of a plan to monopolize the market, but it could also simply be somewhat random nonsense puffery talk like when someone says "our graphics blow away the competition!" Given that it was sent back in 2019, the distance in time from the Activision deal makes it potentially less relevant.
The allegation is that the email is "uncontroverted evidence that Microsoft had the intention to put its main competition, the Sony PlayStation, out of the market." What I want to know is whether the email is a somewhat innocuous, "we want to relegate the PlayStation to the status of an also-ran while we become the premier gaming console" or something more serious like "our strategy to drive Sony out of the market is by buying up independent publishers and then making their games platform-exclusives to the Xbox." For the first one, I'm sure I could dredge up communications at any company that are similar. For the second, it shows a clear danger to competition and the market.
Yes, it is a bit silly to link the two. Microsoft wants to beat Sony. No kidding. Unless it is a detailed plan of how to push Sony out of the market by acquiring game studios I don't think it has much relevance. Of course the strategy is to gain market share and of course the main reason of acquiring game studios is to gain more market share.
I don’t think a few years makes that big of a difference. What if the email says “We can crush Playstation by buying Activision after their next gen console comes out”?
> But when the plantiff is using circumstantial evidence to deduce what the email must have contained
That's not what's happening. It's sealed to the public, not the lawyers.
The article even mentions this:
> The passage appears to be from Exhibit K, a sealed document that the gamers’ lawyers and Microsoft’s attorneys have been arguing over.
> In legal documents, Microsoft characterized the email as an “internal exchange” that should remain sealed; a Microsoft rep declined to comment further.
Doesn't change our perspective, I'll wait and see how this gets ruled on before trying to make up my mind. I can easily believe that Microsoft would do such a thing, I mean it has repeatedly done so, but I don't like taking one party to a lawsuit's word about evidence I cannot see as fact.
I'll see what the judge says, or if they decide to unseal this one.
I'm sure that is the modus operandi for any business. That is, to find ways to give the business an advantage over any competition...and hopefully put them out of business in the process.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> I'm sure that is the modus operandi for any business.
Probably depends on the scope / kind of business. And maybe the kind of people running it?
E.g., my wife has no desire to grow her photography business (a sole proprietorship). She's content for it to be a source of income for however long she wants to keep doing it.
I think the core of it is that we want businesses to win by striving to offer a better product. Not to manipulate the marketplace conditions so that they don’t need to.
Microsoft has been the main driver in the movement of cross-play between platforms (Xbox, PS, Nintendo), which can only be described as a huge good for gamers of all types.
Sony on the other hand, has been trying to keep their platform closed.
>Sony's public rationale of being skeptical of crossplay was stated to be about the “risks” of exposing Sony players to non-PSN markets, but really, it seems to just have been about trying to throw its big sales lead around.
In my reading the plaintiff does have the contents of the email, it's in their filing. The contents of the email within the filing itself seem to be redacted from the public.
> If you think this merger will "eliminate" Playstation, you're seriously fooling yourself.
If you think this is impossible, you're seriously fooling yourself. Most people look at two things when buying a video game console: which games does it provide, and what consoles do my friends have? If most of the popular and recurring franchises are only available for one platform (and will stay as such in the future), why could PlayStation fundamentally not go under?
In the specific case of Activision, I really don't think making Activision be Xbox exclusive would kill Playstation. Activision has a pretty bad reputation in recent years, and (besides Call of Duty) the games they've put out recently have generally failed to be very influential: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activision#2010s
However, purchase of Activision may still be part of a larger anti-competitive scheme Microsoft has cooked up. I believe they've been buying lots of other game studios and publishers as well.
You're looking at part of the acquisition, not the full one.
MS isn't acquiring Activision alone, they are acquiring Activision-Blizzard.
Which includes Activision Publishing, Blizzard Entertainment, King (Candy Crush), Major League Gaming, Activision Blizzard Studios, Infinity Ward and Treyarch among others.
No one on that list devs or publishes the games that sell PlayStations.
Sony are at least a decade ahead of MS in terms of having built a pipeline of developers that have the IP and quality standards that are console sellers even at the $500 price point.
I toyed with the idea of buying a series s because forza horizon is fun but it wasn't enough to justify even a $250 console.
Don’t move the goalposts, this isn’t about shifting a “few Xboxs” this is about PlayStation going out of business because of the merger, which is obviously an impossible claim by your own admission.
I’d love to play God of War, The Last of Us, Drake’s Uncharted, Horizon Forbidden West, and a bunch of other PS5 exclusives.
Somehow this is different though, because Microsoft.
Sony went all in on exclusivity agreements and were dragged kicking and screaming into allowing cross play with other platforms. They are not the good guys here.
The difference is that the games you mentioned were made by developers that have been Sony in-house or second-party studios for literal decades, and weren't hoovered up from the open market like Microsoft is trying to do now because of how badly they mismanaged their own studios (343 Industries, The Coalition, Rare, etc).
With the possible exception of "Drake’s Uncharted" which I've never heard of, none of the other games you listed (including all currently released games in the Uncharted franchise) are PS5 exclusives (although most were initially only released on PS 2, 3, or 4)
It's kind of true. I've always looked at Xbox as a low-end gaming PC that can't do much else but play games. Last time I checked there were only a few PS5 exclusives, and all of the biggest titles for the PS5 were either also PC games or remakes of PS3 or PS4 titles.
So what you're saying is it would increase competition by selling more of the currently-less-popular platform rather than reduce it by eliminating the dominant platform? That sounds like an argument in favor of the deal.
Playstation also has longstanding advantage for non-competitive games (JRPGs, action adventure, etc). The 360 was the last generation of Xbox that had a comparably wide spread of genres… each generation since has been host mostly to things like competitive FPS games.
Due to this, I've not felt a need to own an Xbox in a long time. A combo of a PS4/PS5 and custom PC has yielded the best coverage.
I agree that Activision does have a bad reputation, but I'm not so sure that is what comes to most peoples mind when they look at series like Call of Duty. Remember, a console is a multi-year investment. Even if Call of Duty games (and their other series) are bad right now, people will still consider the next 5 years of games when making their decision.
The Blizzard brands also have a massive hold in terms of player attention. Other than the names, I'm not sure it would be exceedingly difficult to re-create CoD style gameplay in another game. I mean even CoD isn't so unique, just critical mass and popularity over time.
In the end, it's the brands themselves that hold customers. They carry from release to release, good and bad. That's a harder ground to make up for than gameplay or style.
Because everyone and their brother seems to prefer PlayStation. You said it yourself, what consoles do my friends have? I have both the XSX and the PS5, but most of my friends and relatives only have a PS5. They have an extensive catalog of digital games from the PlayStation store and it would take a lot more than this deal to get them to completely abandon Sony.
Aren’t most of those cases Sony funding the development of a game? I.E. If it does well, great, Sony has a new IP. If it bombs, then it’s Sony’s money down the drain.
I can only see it benefiting the market since certain games might not have gotten made otherwise - e.g. Demon Souls; which spawn quite a number of spin offs, together they practically form their own genre.
If Microsoft buys Activision, wouldn't they then be funding Activision's development? The major difference here appears to be looking at a deal in foresight vs. hindsight.
Sony funds developers = PlayStation gets “extra” games that otherwise wouldn’t exist. No one else is affected.
Microsoft buys Activision = long running Activision franchises (eventually) become MS exclusive. Xbox gain nothing but everyone else lose out on franchises they used to enjoy.
One brings into existence games that probably wouldn’t have been made otherwise - and the investor takes the risk of the game bombing.
The other is primarily to deny the competition access to long running popular franchises - and is practically risk free since those franchises are almost guaranteed to print money.
There's a difference between "X company pays a developer for one game, now" and "X company has purchased the developer outright so all future games will be available only on this platform."
People certainly talked about it, but nobody decried the exclusivity of Persona 5 as an anticompetitive move by Atlus or Sony. It's just how they do business - Sony licenses and funds exclusive titles for their platform, and nobody really bats an eye.
Microsoft has decided turnabout is fair play, and people are acting like it's a Console War-crime. Why? Nintendo has spurned AAA devs since the Wii era and they're doing just fine. I take no side in the console war, but Sony can't be a fair-weather friend to platform exclusivity.
Sony has created or acquihired many of its first party studios that develop original IP specifically for PlayStation. Or they just fund third-party studios to create new exclusive games. You could argue that, if not for Sony, many of those games wouldn't even exist. In recent times, from what I can recall, the only large studio that Sony acquired was Bungie. Which is tiny compared to Bethesda or Activision, and continues to support and release (Marathon) new games on Xbox and Windows.
Now compare this to what Microsoft is doing. They mostly failed to create good first party games on their own (apart from a few gems), and are now resorting to buying up not just individual game studios but whole publishers in order to make their games exclusives to their own platforms.
What Sony is doing is creating real value to players. What Microsoft is doing is primarily meant to create value for shareholders. As a gamer, I strongly prefer the former.
I’m going to have to strongly disagree with the idea that Microsoft isn’t creating real value to players.
Gamepass is literally the best deal for someone playing video games, full stop. The price may get jacked up in the future but right now it is stupid good.
Also you’re really not being honest about the historical aspect of Sony and first party games. You said as much but I don’t see why you’re giving Sony a pass for snapping up a stable of developers for first party games over time but knocking Microsoft for being late to the party and close the gap. It’s the same thing for the same result.
Whichever you prefer is fine. Most of Sony’s first party stuff is very different to the Microsoft stuff.
Sony has engaged in anticompetitive practices a lot in recent history. They tried really hard to prevent cross platform play, going so far as to both lie about it and also throw a “think of the children” in there. They also are the platform that wants money to support cross platform play.
I'm not arguing that Sony are saints and Microsoft is the devil. I agree that Gamepass is awesome value and forced Sony to improve their PS+ offerings (competition is awesome!). However, there's a stark difference between Sony buying and investing in game studios after a long partnership (like in the case of Naughty Dog or Insomniac Games), which allows those studios to create bigger and more ambitious games, and Microsoft snapping up multiple large, well funded and profitable, game publishing companies. All I'm really trying to say is that the former deploys capital to fund new games in order to gain market share by competing on quality of the product (which is clearly working for Sony), whereas the latter is deploying capital to just snap up market share directly...
Left to their own devices, Activision/Blizzard would have just died. If your goal is games continuing to get made regardless of the platform they appear on, I'd argue the Microsoft acquisition is a net win for Blizzard fans.
A Sony video game console monopoly will not create value to players.
Without Microsoft making drastic moves like this, the XBox won’t survive much longer. Nintendo has effectively become a different market segment, and I just don’t see any other company ever bringing a serious competitor to market any time soon if Microsoft is forced to exit.
Let’s entertain the idea and pretend they “eliminated” Sony with this acquisition and, against all odds, all those Sony gamers jumped ship and moved over.
Well, I guess that would make Microsoft quite the monopoly then, right? Oh darn, everyone seems to have forgotten about Nintendo who sells more consoles than Sony and Microsoft. Oops, everyone also forgot about Steam with hundreds of millions of users who is also releasing consoles. Last, but certainly not least, Amazon just entered the streaming game space and, based the CMA’s recent definition (https://www.vgchartz.com/article/457194/eu-official-cma-over...), that’s 200m new streaming game subscribers.
At the end of the day this acquisition will suck for Sony gamers just like it sucked when Sony acquired developers and made their games Sony exclusives. This won’t make Microsoft a monopoly in any quantifiable metric, so I see no way the acquisition gets stopped by any logical judge.
If you disagree and think this can make Microsoft a monopoly then show me the numbers because I see 0 paths forward for Microsoft to do that without acquiring or eliminating Sony, Nintendo, Steam and Amazon. I know Microsoft has deep pockets but they are not that deep.
So you are fine when Microsoft would fund the next games of Activision-Blizzard and demand exclusivity for Xbox platform after Sony's exclusivity contracts end like for CoD next year?
It's much more than a year. Microsoft pledged full Call of Duty availability on rival platforms for at least 10 years[1]. Sony refused to sign, Nintendo signed it[2].
Those are all published by Sony, though. Are you saying that console makers simply shouldn’t work on games at all?
IMO there’s a huge difference between negotiating exclusivity for a handful of popular games you publish, and spending 2/3 of your competitor’s entire market cap to acquire the giant studios making a significant amount of the most successful game franchises on the market.
I don't know the reason - but PSN has a reputation (seemingly earned) of having a better community. More numerous and less toxic gamers than Xbox Live.
The real issue isn't at Xbox eliminating PS. The issue is escalation of buyouts/mergers with the survival of the strongest, richest, and biggest market - essentially a monopoly of a market. This not only destroy the actual game selling diversity but also hogging of potential new game programmers and artists. Those wished to start in this industry will have to pay their homage tax/initiation with some internships or job there. If the this deal is allowed, Sony (with the backing of Japanese governments) will start to do massive mergers. And we even not talk about Chinese governments involving to back Japanese, and Chinese companies as long as not USA-based. There is not a need to favor Microsoft or Xbox with this merger. They can easily sign deals with Activision to get exclusive dlcs or games. They already done so with OpenAI ChatGPT without the need to swallow it. This merger MUST be stopped. Anyone against it is just being incredible naive and believe MS is guided by a saint or Mother Teresa.
Are you sure? Post-acquisition, Bethesda is making at least some of their upcoming games Xbox-exclusive. Unclear why Microsoft wouldn't do the same with Activision.
Skeptics and Microsoft will point to ten year agreements to keep Call of Duty on as many platforms as possible. Ten years is really not that much time. Ten years ago the PS4 and Xbox One launched. Ten years from now the PS7 might be coming out. Imagine the news that Call of Duty will not be coming to the newest Playstation. That's one series. All other new and existing IP could be locked down.
Call of Duty is a huge franchise that makes bucket loads of money on yearly games, season passes, DLC, other monetization, merchandising, esports, and more. It's so much bigger than the ZeniMax catalog. Microsoft have no reason to gate 50% of the playerbase for "hardware exclusivity" given that lucrative revenue channel.
If you think Microsoft wouldn't look to shoulder a good product out of one market and into their's.... I'm curious if we are talking about the same Microsoft. They were clearly only wanting to compete with WordPerfect, Lotus, etc.... :D
(Heck, even in games, wasn't Halo originally a Mac title?)
My layperson's understanding of anti-trust law is that the intent of the merger is of interest.
Suppose there is a communication where a company leader says the motivation for an acquisition is to eliminate a competitor. In that case, the acquisition may be illegal under the right circumstances.
Just look at what happened to Chrom(e|ium), when rebranded as Edge in Windows 10. Same applies here. MS is using its brute force as always, since they have almost zero innovation regarding games on Xbox. Except Kinect, that was cool tho.
All this shows Microsoft has never changed. That is why I am and always have been suspicious about WSL and Microsoft's influence on the Linux Foundation.
I prefer VSCodium builds over proprietary Microsoft ones any day of the week, but:
> This is not a fork. This is a repository of scripts to automatically build Microsoft's vscode repository into freely-licensed binaries with a community-driven default configuration
This is the correct way to go about it imho. A real hard fork would inevitably fall behind upstream and the project will eventually be abandoned.
Theia[1] is a bit closer to a hard fork. They even try very hard to avoid saying outright they're just a rebranded VS Code, using euphemism such as "Theia embraces many of the design decisions [of VS Code] and even directly supports VS Code extensions."
There's nothing wrong with that. VSCode will certainly have a lot more development that a fork would ever see. So the best thing to do here is simply build VSCode with all proprietary stuff removed.
Clangd and rust-analyzer plugins aren't made by MS. Python has a couple separate ones, one of which the official Microsoft plugin uses. I think the only language needing a MS plugin is TypeScript, which is a MS language anyway.
Microsoft hasn't changed, but the opposition has. Back in the old days it was easy to hate Microsoft. They were doing as much damage as possible to Linux and open source. Their rivals today are just as bad as they are - maybe worse.
I want to hate Google, but they still seem to be less evil.
Free Excel/Word/PPT(sorry libre office for forgetting about you), Android/Chrome is still FOSS and I use their degoogled versions, they contributed hugely to AI.
But yeah, the FAAMG is not something to be worshiped. Heck, its a red flag if you are a genuine fan of one of these companies.
> Their rivals today are just as bad as they are - maybe worse.
I might agree if we look at each one of them individually.
The issue with Microsoft is that their product offer has a breath that most competitors cannot even start to fathom. Specifically, Sony Entertainment may be a competitor in the console gaming space, but Microsoft gaming divisions go further, and are tightly integrated with others, e.g. DirectX, Windows, XBox, Azure.
IMO Teams is pretty meh... most of them are... and while I like most of Slack better, it is what it is. Teams fits in for those tied to other MS services, Azure AD, O/M365, etc.
I do wish Teams. would put a little more effort on their Linux client though. I know it's just an electron wrapper, but still. A little testing and supporting the non-enterprise users would be nice.
While I appreciate parts of what MS has done, it's a massive corporation with different divisions doing things that are much more open and others much more closed off. I'm sure there's lots of in-fighting between the differing approaches.
I REALLY don't like the idea of hardware companies also owning content creation at all. Wether it's Sony owning film companies or MS owning game companies. There should absolutely be some level of conflict and negotiation between these portions of the market in order for markets to work. Vertical monopolies are just as bad as horizontal ones.
Much like the government, I really feel that corporations should be limited in scope and conglomerates are problematic.
edit: I've had a disdain for Sony since the CD computer malware a couple decades ago. Between that and Bluray winning the content war, when HD-DVD had won on pricing.
Can we get the headline changed to not omit critical context present in the Axios headline that the "proof" is being claimed by lawyers suing Microsoft?
Neither one should be as big as they already are. Can we just stop all of this vertical integration in tech? We had this "conversation" in the US in the early 1900's, and I think we nominally balanced all the interested involved. Then the economists all got bought off to say that monopolies were a GOOD thing, and the government stopped putting any limits on corporations at all. We need to return to serious "trust busting."
In this thread, people are 1) assuming what the lawyers say is actually contained in the redacted text (and would stand the scrutiny of the court) 2) that Microsoft's culture twenty years ago is largely similar to its culture today. This is one of those times a bunch of commenters run with the same ideas - the number of these doesn't make them any more credible.
I wonder if how this connects to Phil Spencer saying earlier this year that making great games won't help overtake PlayStation[0]. That was said shortly after the second government commission blocked MS's acquisition of Activision. Perhaps executives were still ruminating on their recently failed strategy to kill PlayStation?
Regardless, it's sad they're pursuing this race to the bottom rather than trying to improve their own products to a competitive standard.
Unsurprising. Microsoft has not changed and will never change.
They will do anything to lobby and bribe the regulators such as the ones in the EU to support their anti-competitive and horizontal integration of buying already established multi-billion dollar franchises.
There is always an extinguish part with Microsoft and they are getting very clever at redefining the method, as the strategy has always been the same. The only time people realize this is when it is too late, despite all the warnings and red flags.
Their business is run shrewdly in some areas, especially around competition.
The "knifed you in the neck, surprise!" pattern played out for one of my employers / a start-up whom MS paid an endearing visit to from high-level execs, before drowning us.
Lobbying is also a way to secure your interests, and there is nothing wrong with that as long as your interests are ethically defensible.
You don't seem to have a list of specific complaints against Microsoft, and in that regard I actually trust regulators more than random defamatory remarks on the internet.
I think that the cloud assets Microsoft has in Azure are a far more eminent competitive threat than buying Activision.
Microsoft has against Sony the advantage of being able to leverage its cloud division to undercut Sony with GamePass. From day one, Microsoft has datacenters close to most markets and can just add more and more racks of Xboxes in those locations, leveraging their investments in the cloud business to gain an advantage in the gaming business.
A firewall should be enough. Xbox should use Azure as any other customer, with no special conditions. At least not the ones that Sony or any other could get from Azure given their contract volumes.
This is the natural consequence of infinite growth winner-takes-all competition, bunch of MBA cutthroat nonsense. There's 0 reason Microsoft and Sony need to actually compete on this front... it's a massive market with enough space for both of them to make absurd amounts of money.
When a Microsoft employee receives a call from Matt Booty (head of XBox Game Studios), do you think they say to those around them - “I’m sorry, please excuse me. I have to take this Booty call.”?
It just seems odd that such an unimportant merger is being so strongly resisted. At the end of the day, videogames are completely unimportant to society (edit: ok, completely non-essential, rather than 'unimportant')
It was rejected by the UK, under a government with a history of privatising critical natural monopolies (railways, energy, water, Royal Mail), no less.
(Meanwhile, the likes of Blackrock and Vanguard are seemingly allowed to pretty much own everything, and manage to remain fairly invisible to average consumers/voters...)
> It just seems odd that such an unimportant merger is being so strongly resisted.
Videogames are a huge consumer market. Monopolistic behavior will harm consumers.
The fact that other companies in others areas "are allowed to pretty much own everything" is a non-comment. Hypothetical regulatory actions against "the likes of Blackrock and Vanguard" do not preclude regulatory action against Microsoft/Activision.
I'd also add with respect to the importance of the merger: this merger has signaled that Activision's board are looking for an exit. Activision's own long, weird, sloppy history is being the company a lot of other companies exited into. Activision owns an absurd amount of the cultural past of videogames because of its fast and loose mergers and acquisitions game.
In turn Activision have seemed to be dreadful archivists and gatekeepers of the massive amount of industry history that they own. There are Infocom and Sierra and Davidson and Knowledge Associates classics that are still locked in their vaults that can't be legally purchased today. (GOG has done a lot to change that, but there's always still more in the Activision vaults.) Among other things, they've "lost" entire 1990s/2000s franchises that all signs point to them having the legal rights but they have no clue what happened to them ("No One Lives Forever" is a favorite example of some, and the easiest example to mind, but isn't the only example).
There's an importance to them signaling their own interest in exiting here because of that history of exits that Activision already oversaw. Whoever buys Activision next may have an easy bar to clear on being better than Activision was at owning such a large part of the past of videogames. But we don't want to underestimate how much of a gatekeeper versus archivist dynamic is in play of whoever buys Activision or whichever way Activision exits. (If Activision were instead to exit via vultures in one way or another, who knows what will happen to the past of videogames if the raw pieces are all put up for the highest bidder and scattered to the winds. That may be a good thing, or it could mean that even the piecemeal access on GOG to Activision's back catalog is at risk. We wouldn't know until the dust clears and by then it may be too late.)
Preserving digital culture is a legit issue. But it's about copyright laws, not about corporate mergers.
Apple have wiped vast numbers of early iPhone games from existence by having their walled garden and limited backward compatibility. Most early iPhone games, from the 32-bit pre-F2P era will never be played again. But nobody really cares about those.
Much bigger games have been lost too. Many MMOs, in particular, as nobody ever had access to the server-side code. And most modern console games have online components and risk becoming unplayable when the servers are turned off.
Classics from Infocom and Sierra can at least be preserved by enthusiasts, as physical copies still exist and individual fans can ignore the copyright question.
The digital preservation issue extends beyond games, too. We may be entering a future were even books, in their digital form, are frequently updated to fit present-day cultural sensitivities. And without physical copies, it may become impossible to reference the original text, or even know whether edits have occurred.
> But it's about copyright laws, not about corporate mergers.
It's definitely both. I don't disagree with anything you've added.
I'd also add that if we are wishing for copyright law reform ponies, I believe copyright terms are far too long and maybe IP like Infocom's should be public domain already under a far shorter copyright term. (The original US copyright full term was 14 years. That term length would make a lot of interesting videogames public domain today for culture to enhance/expand upon/remix/rebuild/reuse.)
That said, under current copyright law and current copyright terms, the publisher has an extremely heavy influence on what remains in print, so being concerned about corporate mergers is a necessary plight under the current copyright regime. We can wish for better copyright laws and still decry the publishers gatekeeping IP under the existing copyright regime.
I have been gaming for decades and I've never felt the need to play games from every studio.
Heck, large studios are mostly a negative in the modern era. They have the resources to use microtransactions and DRM. Meanwhile indie games have to try their best to get any attention.
Even if M$ bought every studio in existence, PlayStation and Nintendo, there would still be indie games in a few years. Not to mention uncountable number of games from the last few decades that is enough entertainment to last you a few lifetimes.
The proposed acquisition is not for "1 studio" but for the entire Activision-Blizzard-King holding company which owns some of the biggest IPs in both the traditional and mobile gaming space, coming just after Microsoft acquired another huge publisher (Zenimax/Bethesda).
Activision is not "1 studio". It is a major publisher of very large videogame IPs.
If the idea is to round up major publishers, "1 studio" at a time, to starve the competition of their suppliers... In what world would that not be monopolistic?
One of them was addicted and we were supposed to go somewhere and I had to kick them off. Lucky for me, he fat thumbed some way to break the game and his level 283 character was lost to history.
Basically made a crappy text based rpg when I was 16 years old in the first week I learned programming.
except what sell consoles are AAA games and not indie games..
Most people will buy indie games for the console they own and they choose the console based on what their social circle have and what big games are available.
> It just seems odd that such an unimportant merger is being so strongly resisted. At the end of the day, videogames are completely unimportant to society.
That's a $350 billion/year industry. It is a huge part of our society whether you think it is or not.
Regardless, such a large acquisition or merger should always be under scrutiny like this. The government should be protecting its citizens from monopolistic and anti-consumer behavior wherever it may pop up. This acquisition clearly has potential for such behavior.
Blackrock and Vanguard don't own everything. While Blackrock does directly control some assets, Vanguard doesn't. They have a large amount of assets under management, which means they manage assets for other people. If all of Vanguard's clients removed their money, vanguard's assets would be a few buildings in Malvern, PA. Even their votes on the board are because they are proxy voters for the actual owners (the clients), and most people just don't exercise their right to vote on things.
Video games, like cinema, footballs, the olympic games or music, are a huge market, and have strong influence on culture.
In fact, given they now employ people from all the other entertainment industries, and make recurring payments, product placements, and build communities, I'd say they are pretty huge.
This is almost a point in favor of having Microsoft ruin the market.
If we consider that media/marketing driven entertainment is a negative externality, having bad games would cause people to do entertainment that is more akin to their personal interests.
More outdoor time, more reading time, less playing the latest IP from a studio that spent millions on commercials to make an addicting game.
> If we consider that media/marketing driven entertainment is a negative externality
I guess that's the difference here. Most people do not consider this a negative, it gives them more options. You're fooling yourself if you think people would prefer to ditch AAA games and just have obscure indie titles.
I honestly do not care about that, if it was the case. Competition can be a very bad thing in this field, because it decreases the quality of the games by limiting compatibility with other, often older, established platforms, and forces people into a vendor lock-in.
There should be a law that required platform compatibility. Games released on playstation and xbox should also be available on the Windows and Linux PCs – it's not because Microsoft can't do it, it is because they want to keep users locked-in.
As an old gamer I'd hate to see Blizzard on Microsoft's hands, but as a Microsoft shareholder I would not mind it. Surely there must be a middleground. Microsoft could buy half the shares.
I just fear what will happen with the ecosystem of games playable on battle.net, support for old games. Etc. If you look at EA Games, then many of the titles released through them is full of bugs that causes crashes, and games might not even be playable on modern systems. Not so with Blizzard titles.
> Competition can be a bad thing in this field, because it decreases the quality of the games
Where did you get that from? Some of the best games I have ever played were Xbox or PlayStation exclusive and probably wouldn't have happened the way they did without funding from Microsoft/Sony for the exclusivity deal. The value for Sony selling an exclusive game is not just the box price, but the price of the console itself too, so they are willing to accept projects that won't be full of microtransactions, shitty overpriced DLCs, or buggy botched releases since a successful release of a long awaited game could be the difference between someone going for PC/Xbox or getting the new Sony console.
> There should be a law that required platform compatibility. Games released on playstation and xbox should also be available on the Windows and Linux PC
That seems like it would ruin indy devs.
I'd much prefer a law that prohibits or severely limits the terms of exclusivity agreements.
I would not mind that actually, because games developed my so-called independent developers are usually not that good.
Creating quality games requires a large amount of cash reserves to pay for a creative team, including programmers; independents usually do not have that luxury.
If Microsoft got to buy Blizzard it might actually cement Blizzard's future, securing the old titles and ensuring future ones. But, it might also get shut down because of lack of focus. I'd much rather have Blizzard remain independent to some degree, because then they may remain undisturbed.
Having said that, however, the arguments presented by regulators are pretty much ridiculous. They seem to only care about competition, and not about what is best for the future of Blizzard and gaming. Too much competition can ultimately degrade and obstruct the end users – I'd also hate to see that.
> I would not mind that actually, because games developed my so-called independent developers are usually not that good.
Sure and the majority of indie developers lose money on their games. However sometimes indie studios produce amazing games and we don't want to prevent that from happening or we'd miss out on games that are some of my all time favorites like FTL and Minecraft (not to mention dozens of others.)
> Creating quality games requires a large amount of cash reserves to pay for a creative team, including programmers; independents usually do not have that luxury.
Only for certain types of games. Indie games don't have the funding to produce massive amounts of assets, but they have the freedom to take risks that larger studios can't. Without that innovation, we'd see even more stagnation in the AAA game market.
The email may well prove that Microsoft has this plan, I certainly wouldn't put it past Microsoft. It is in the established nature of Microsoft to behave in such anti-competitive ways, the shoe fits. But when the plantiff is using circumstantial evidence to deduce what the email must have contained, I think it's quite a stretch to say the email "proves" anything.