Microsoft's acquisition of Activison Blizzard

ultimateFF

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29 Jun 2023
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ok, but in japan if pubs have to limit exclusives per platform holder then the remaining Japanese devs would have no choice but to launch on xbox, that would grow xbox in japan. At the moment devs in japan just sign up unlimited with nintendo and sony.
Stop trying to make xbox happened in japan man :ROFLMAO:. Japanese don't like xbox since like original xbox days, and it's not japanese publishers obligation to grow xbox there lol.
 

Swolf712

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29 Jun 2022
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Wisconsin, USA
So Sony should restructure PS Plus just to suit one game?


It still boggles the mind that Sony has said they literally cannot afford to do this without massively shrinking game scale and budgets, almost every major publisher agrees with them and says "yes, this is a thing", and her only response was "bUt tHe cOnSuMeR wOuLd bEnEfIt!"

How would they benefit from worse games? Like that was never even a consideration.

But what do I expect from someone who thinks everyone has a $1k+ gaming PC and that the Switch is comparable or better than the PS5 or Series X because it can be hooked up to a TV AND carried around?

On that same note though, the FTC only started looking into all this recently. They barely know this industry. They managed to have some good questions, great ones even, but when it came to stating their case from the gaming POV, they were clearly underprepared.

Just a weird, gross situation we're in, that the future of our entire hobby is in the hands of people who know almost nothing about it.
 

daniel5043

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19 Jan 2023
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It still boggles the mind that Sony has said they literally cannot afford to do this without massively shrinking game scale and budgets, almost every major publisher agrees with them and says "yes, this is a thing", and her only response was "bUt tHe cOnSuMeR wOuLd bEnEfIt!"

How would they benefit from worse games? Like that was never even a consideration.

But what do I expect from someone who thinks everyone has a $1k+ gaming PC and that the Switch is comparable or better than the PS5 or Series X because it can be hooked up to a TV AND carried around?

On that same note though, the FTC only started looking into all this recently. They barely know this industry. They managed to have some good questions, great ones even, but when it came to stating their case from the gaming POV, they were clearly underprepared.

Just a weird, gross situation we're in, that the future of our entire hobby is in the hands of people who know almost nothing about it.
Most of them are greedy fucks who don't understand how money works
 

daniel5043

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19 Jan 2023
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Best thing the judge can do is grant pi, then have the ftc write up guidelines for the video games industry both cloud and console, regulate the fuck out of it.

1. pubs cant sign/negotiate no more than 4 third party exclusive deals per year with platform holders. So thats 4 per year for Sony, MS, nintendo.

2. 3rd party exclusives cant be permanent, they expire 1 year after game is launched on the initial platform, no extensions.

Call me crazy but i think its the best way to cool off a $2 trillion company and allow more games on all 3 consoles eventually, making your 1st party the only real differentiator, thereby cause them to double down on in house development.
That sounds awful for third parties and probably won't stop acquisitions
 

AshHunter216

Banned
8 Jan 2023
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7,628
Yeah and not even just the cloud, console is where most of her idiocy has surfaced. Good grief. Good luck to the FTC they are gonna need it.
FTC only real chance is the cloud SLC. Judge agrees that the cloud is a market at least. I found it interesting that even notoriously pro-deal lawyer Hoeg Law characterized this as a toss-up once the cloud came into play. Also, the judge supposedly ended by saying that this is going to be a hard case to figure out.

She could still very much so rule in MS favor, but I remember this forum (myself included) being extremely doom and gloom on the eve of the cma decision as well.
 

AshHunter216

Banned
8 Jan 2023
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Isn't the FTC'S main argument for this injunction basically that MS shouldn't be allowed to merge until they've had more time to figure out the effects?

Supposedly, the FTC needs to win on market definitions, potential harm (Supposedly they don't have to prove without a shadow of a doubt, just raise serious enough questions about it, and prove that no one would be hurt by leaving MS and ABK separate
 

Gediminas

Boy...
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21 Jun 2022
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That sounds awful for third parties and probably won't stop acquisitions
it would make even more acquisitions most probably because you can't have exclusive stuff.

but there is underlining biggest issue. no one could enter a market then. because it would cost too much money. even google can't do shit. in the court they even said that, that it cost way to much and sustain.

of course, out of this situation, m$ would be a winner and can easily fuck up everyone in the world. so what is a point of regulators etc.. then?
 

thicc_girls_are_teh_best

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24 Jun 2022
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Best thing the judge can do is grant pi, then have the ftc write up guidelines for the video games industry both cloud and console, regulate the fuck out of it.

1. pubs cant sign/negotiate no more than 4 third party exclusive deals per year with platform holders. So thats 4 per year for Sony, MS, nintendo.

2. 3rd party exclusives cant be permanent, they expire 1 year after game is launched on the initial platform, no extensions.

Call me crazy but i think its the best way to cool off a $2 trillion company and allow more games on all 3 consoles eventually, making your 1st party the only real differentiator, thereby cause them to double down on in house development.

No offense but this is a terrible idea. The government would love for nothing more than to regulate the gaming industry, to its benefit. That's the risk the industry faced in the early '90s, BTW. It would be magnitudes better if the industry self-regulated, similar to the decision between Sega & various 3P publishers to help form the ESRB.

Your first point isn't even much of a regulation; 4 games per publisher or 4 games for all publishers collectively? How would the latter be fair to publishers? What if a publisher wants to do a deal with a given platform holder but can't because they're locked out due to an arbitrary limit? Wouldn't limiting platform holders to 4 3P exclusivity deals a year automatically hurt smaller 3P publishers like Annapurna or Devolver Digital? How would smaller publishers be able to realistically compete with the bigger publishers for getting 3P exclusivity deals with platform holders? What criteria would exist to determine how two competing 3P publishers can go about seeing who wins a contract deal? Can't platform holders arbitrarily make exclusivity deals costlier since they know the amount of slots are limited, so per-game deals end up costing a lot more?

The second point also has its problems. What if the 3P exclusive uses propriety tech belonging to the platform holder, which would require the game to be exclusive for longer than a year as the port to other platforms might not be able to use that tech and have to switch to other tech? What if the platform holder didn't just pay to "moneyhat" the game, but actively funded the game's development either partially or fully? Shouldn't they have a right to claim in a sense that the game is as much 1P as it is 3P, and have it remain an exclusive for longer? What if the game has licensing issues that necessitate changes to bring it to other platforms, who pays to get those licensing issues resolved?

That's why it's not just easy to blanket-regulate 3P exclusivity deals, or especially let the government hands-off regulate an entire industry for deals that have generally been perfectly fine, even if can at times favor the market leader. Nothing inherently stops gamers from purchasing multiple platforms to access all the exclusives out there, other than some financial situation on their end. But I don't buy the idea people are "inherently" owed access to every single thing on a single platform or ecosystem just because that's the only platform or ecosystem they chose to invest into. Choices have consequences, positive and negative, and gaming is a privilege, not a right.
 
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laynelane

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14 Jul 2022
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ok, but in japan if pubs have to limit exclusives per platform holder then the remaining Japanese devs would have no choice but to launch on xbox, that would grow xbox in japan. At the moment devs in japan just sign up unlimited with nintendo and sony.

XBox's world-wide market share is due to their own efforts and decisions. Why should developers be forced to reward that and use their time and money to develop for them? XBox isn't being skipped by developers because of some inherent bias - it's because developing for two SKUs is an issue (especially when one is underpowered), Game Pass (which has conditioned the user base to not buy games and cannibalizes sales), and the simple fact that some genres don't do well on the platform (which isn't helped by XBox's dude bro focus). All those decisions were made by XBox. Changing the laws to mitigate their poor choices is no different than them buying publishers in order to "compete". It just rewards failure.
 

Sleepy Brown

Banned
5 Jul 2022
317
545
Regardless, deal still dies at the desk of the CMA, right?
No.
In a week the judge will explain how she won't grant the preliminary injunction. The FTC is going to lose, just like everyone expected.

Microsoft (and Activision-Blizzard) will probably immediately strike and have the deal go through when the decsison is announced before the deal date. Any objections they have with CMA... they will take them later when it's already gone through.

It's pretty much over. Like I already said many times in the past. This whole thing was a huge waste of time for Sony, the FTC and the CMA. At least we got some interesting informations in the last few days. The budgets of Sony's 1st party games and Microsoft's acquisition targets after the the Activision-Blizzard acquisition. Sega will be next. I guess in 2024/2025.
 

thicc_girls_are_teh_best

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24 Jun 2022
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No.
In a week the judge will explain how she won't grant the preliminary injunction. The FTC is going to lose, just like everyone expected.

Microsoft (and Activision-Blizzard) will probably immediately strike and have the deal go through when the decsison is announced before the deal date. Any objections they have with CMA... they will take them later when it's already gone through.

It's pretty much over. Like I already said many times in the past. This whole thing was a huge waste of time for Sony, the FTC and the CMA. At least we got some interesting informations in the last few days. The budgets of Sony's 1st party games and Microsoft's acquisition targets after the the Activision-Blizzard acquisition. Sega will be next. I guess in 2024/2025.

You must be really popular in the downtown LA comedy club circuit 🤣
 

Gediminas

Boy...
Founder
21 Jun 2022
7,231
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No.
In a week the judge will explain how she won't grant the preliminary injunction. The FTC is going to lose, just like everyone expected.

Microsoft (and Activision-Blizzard) will probably immediately strike and have the deal go through when the decsison is announced before the deal date. Any objections they have with CMA... they will take them later when it's already gone through.

It's pretty much over. Like I already said many times in the past. This whole thing was a huge waste of time for Sony, the FTC and the CMA. At least we got some interesting informations in the last few days. The budgets of Sony's 1st party games and Microsoft's acquisition targets after the the Activision-Blizzard acquisition. Sega will be next. I guess in 2024/2025.
This how denial looks like 😂

Guy making shit up. Wtf is wrong with these people.
 

Dr Bass

The doctor is in
Founder
20 Jun 2022
2,036
3,442
No.
In a week the judge will explain how she won't grant the preliminary injunction. The FTC is going to lose, just like everyone expected.

Microsoft (and Activision-Blizzard) will probably immediately strike and have the deal go through when the decsison is announced before the deal date. Any objections they have with CMA... they will take them later when it's already gone through.

It's pretty much over. Like I already said many times in the past. This whole thing was a huge waste of time for Sony, the FTC and the CMA. At least we got some interesting informations in the last few days. The budgets of Sony's 1st party games and Microsoft's acquisition targets after the the Activision-Blizzard acquisition. Sega will be next. I guess in 2024/2025.
You think the "interesting information" that came out was Sony budgets and MS acquisition targets? Not the bald faced MS lies uncovered by testimony and documents, MS being revealed to not have changed internally at all from yesteryear, or the fact that the "Nice Guy Phil" act was a complete charade?

You truly are sleepy. You're not even paying attention.