0% chance. The CMA will not approve.
They don't seem to realize that trying to get into a court battle to overturn a negative ruling would be a waste of time and resources that could be spent on something more productive.
As a capitalist who believes in a free market, how can you justify propping up a failing business in the name of competition?
The xbox is a failing business within an industry and it asking to be propped up by buying other peoples' (ABK) games because they're shit at making their own and therefore cannot compete.
Xbox is not a business, Microsoft is. Xbox is part of Microsoft's corporate ecosystem and their hope is that they can leverage stuff like Azure to make it profitable and help out the rest of the company. If anything, the only worry I have is that Activision's CEO agreed to this deal in a way that benefits himself but hurts Activision shareholders since he announced it at a time where Activision's shareprice is artificially low due to bad PR, having done so only to save his own hide. Bobby Kotick has been a great leader for Activision, taking it from a failed tech company to the world's largest third party maker of video games, but that doesn't give him the right to fleece Activision's true owners for his own benefit.
yes, xbox lost 67B in 20 years, but of course, it is not failing business, it is failed.
I don't know what the rambling about activision has to do with anything. Can you see how a $1 trillion company 'leveraging' azure could possibly be bad for the industry and the customers?
How about they invest in their own studios and create new ones, thus generating new jobs and hiring more people instead of buying the whole industry, laying off redundancy and taking games away from other platforms? How does that sound to you?
Like a misuse of resources when they can instead buy Activision for far less than its actually worth.
They have 70Bi of cash lmao. Why do you care how they spend their resources? Are you a shareholder? No? So it doesn’t matter to you. And the deal will be blocked, talk about waste of resources lmao.
You asked me why they don't do it and I told you why. Why do you care, because I already laid out why I cared (political reasons, related to businesses having the freedom to compete.)
Compete? Hahaha.. trying to buy your way to the top is not competing it’s the opposite of competing.
They haven’t invested shit into their own studios.. maybe you missed the news but they just laid off 10,000 people including from their most recent purchase Bethesda. Microsoft’s whole strat isn’t about investing into their own studios.. it’s about buying franchises, firing developers and transforming those franchises into GaaS models to fit their flailing gamepass service.
Nintendo would say that they don't compete with the other two, blue ocean and all. Sony didn't buy any publishers* but they did buy 5 studios in 2021 and a further 2 in early 2022. These acquisitions though, I would say, had less to do with competing directly with Microsoft and more to do with filling out their release schedule in an era when games take 4 to 7 years to make instead of 2 to 3. I find the focus on "publishers" instead of "studios" here to be asinine anyway, its certainly not what the buyers are thinking about, they want product/output, the fact that they get a "publishing" system with it is if anything a drawback because it duplicates functions they already have.
That 10,000 people was across the whole company, most not being involved in game dev. In the game parts a majority of the layoffs were from 343 which has spend a decade mismanaging Halo. If anything it was about time that they cleaned house there. Now then, as to investments, 343 Industries was one of them, they founded it and had 750 people working there as of 2020. How is that not an investment? Same with the Initiative and the Coalition, though they are both probably smaller in size. Its the under-performance of those groups, as much as anything else, that probably led to them deciding to focus on acquisitions instead.
Yeah because Sony buying a small studio is in anyway comparable to buying up the biggest money maker game/publisher. Microsoft was lucky to get away with Bethesda and Minecraft.. I don’t see why they need to buy all the most popular games to compete.. oh yeah because they can’t create anything worth a damn themselves!
