It's kind of wild that the cornerstone of this deal centers on COD, but given the numbers MW2 just put up the past week, I can easily see why. Those are MCU numbers (when the MCU was still a surefire box office powerhouse; Phase 4 hasn't been hitting the mark super well in multiple ways, maybe Wakanda Forever can start reversing those trends), and ABK pulled that off in a single week.
So I can understand why Sony are worried about what happens to COD if/when MS get ABK, but I also think MS would be absolutely braindead stupid to change the formula as it brings in so much money. I think them downplaying GamePass's share of their gaming revenue going forward plays into this thought, so there are some legitimate reasons to believe them when they say they won't take COD off PlayStation and, now for me, that will probably extend to the traditional annual releases in addition to Warzone.
Generally, I'm not really "against" MS getting ABK. I don't care what money they stand to make, I don't necessarily care what money Sony could stand to lose if, say, they don't have the marketing rights to COD anymore, either. My bigger issue is that if the deal goes through, it acts like a dam-buster for other companies to just go after other big 3P games publishes. I don't want that to happen, and companies like Apple, Amazon etc. will have much easier cases to argue for going after one or several 3P games publishers by just pointing to MS buying ABK. At some point, that effect of acquisitions WILL hurt Sony and also Nintendo, it'll bleed them out of companies that can provide content for their platforms on fair terms (or terms where some other company that's a hardware or services platform holder won't automatically try contorting the terms to benefit them ahead of anyone else), and that would be terrible to see IMO.
So that's why I'm glad at least some of these regulators are looking into the deal with more scrutiny. I hope it means some stricter limitations are imposed upon the market in terms of what companies can be bought, in what frequency buyers can buy, and what standards & practices WRT competing systems or services they have to still play nice by. For example let's say MS gets ABK; I think there needs to be some limitation set where they can't buy another 3P games publisher for a five-year period. Gives them time to produce some meaningful results with the ABK teams, the Zenimax teams etc. to prove that they're doing this for genuine reasons, not just to shore up assets to collect money on where the output is virtually indistinguishable from what the teams produced when they were independent, otherwise what's the point of purchase in terms of adding to the industry with creative output? Gaming isn't just a money-making machine; it makes money because of the quality of the content out there and it's a creative-driven industry at that. So if you're making big purchasing moves with no intent to add back to that space creatively in ways that would not be possible otherwise, that can become an issue.
If MS want to buy smaller independent developers, I don't think any restrictions should be as strict there, but maybe they can only buy a collective totaling a certain valuation (say $250 million) over the 5-year period, and/or only being able to buy three developers who have a valuation combined of $250 million or less. Things like that, things that make it so having ridiculous amounts of money can't just buy your way to being a top earner or potentially starving competitors out of the market. And FWIW, I would impose those same restrictions on ALL companies, so that would include Sony, Embracer, Tencent (Tencent are more about buying majority sales, so some terms to regulate that would be needed), Sazzy Group, etc. Ensure that the independent 3P publisher market always maintains a minimum of collective market valuation, through the devs under those publishers, their IP, technology, assets, workforce sizes and combinations of those things. And all the major market regulators would have to agree to enforce this, together.
I don't even see this as being too wild or controversial; the industry itself has come together to self-regulate before, that's how we got the ESRB. Maybe instead of having the regulators enforce the terms above, the platform holders, publishers, and investment groups could form a consortium and self-regulate the terms among themselves, that probably would save regulators a lot of trouble and make them more favorable to approve whatever acquisitions are actually pursued.
I think that will be completed because I think it wouldn't change a lot their position in the market a lot, in the same way that all previous acquisitions combined didn't highly change MS's position when trying to compete their direct competition (Sony and Nintendo, or in PC Steam, or Apple and Google in mobile plus many mobile publishers), which is above them in terms of market share and install base.
MS is far from causing competitive issues to their direct competitors even acquiring ABK and making CoD full console exclusive because they're even far from being market leaders both in gaming and in each main gaming market.
But at the same time, I think it's logical that regulators will want to investigate it because they don't know this until they investigate the real numbers and they only they know is that a trillion dollar company is buying the top 3rd party publisher and they don't know that this publisher only generates a tiny portion of the money of the market so it isn't really that important, even in the direct competition platform of MS. But as happened until know, I expect regulators approve the deal with no restrictions after investigating the deal.
Well they're already seeing some real numbers, MW2 generated $1 billion in revenue in less than a week through sales alone. There's no other game outside of GTA doing those types of numbers.
All the more reason they will very likely keep COD multiplatform on PS in all its forms, actually. And even find some way to bring it to Switch platforms (combination native & cloud to offset lack of visuals running purely native).
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