Microsoft's acquisition of Activison Blizzard

Airbus

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30 Jun 2022
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Oh no, they're going to keep CoD on PlayStation. For now. They can't justify the price tag they paid for it by yanking it. Yet.


But they CAN offer them the same crappy revenue split that Activision made MS take before, that Phil somehow tried to blame on Sony. Which means they make LESS from CoD while MS makes MORE. Which is why they're going to try to bolster their revenue and try to get to the point where the day they may have to say "no deal" to Xbox and have CoD yanked will be significantly less detrimental to PlayStation's bottom line.
Cod is a lost cause at this point

After 10 years agreement done its goodbye

Everyone here already knows that

Lets move on from that conversation

We are finished talking about cod
 
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reziel

Banned
12 Jun 2023
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I’m out of the loop. What happened? Did the judge approve the merger? Did the CMA change their decision and approve the merger?
Judge denied FTC Pi and shortly after CMA stated they are open to another remedy negotiation with MS.
 

Johnic

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24 Mar 2023
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Oh yeah? Show me the number...

Anyway..

The doom and gloom here is getting too much..

Im gona leave for now...

No other franchise does that.

Also, COD is the 4th best selling franchise ever, behind Pokemon, Mario and Tetris, I believe. Don't quote me on the last one. But take into account they have been out much longer than COD.

At this point it's just coping. It's the same deal with the Zenimax acquisition. Except this time, COD will REALLY hurt. I mean, you're going against what Sony themselves said.
 

Swolf712

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29 Jun 2022
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You are the one assuming I think acquisitions are anti-competitive. What I find anti-competitive is the fact that MS is making them with money that wasn't made by Xbox pretty much getting to shape the market according to their will without consumers having any say in it just because they are a huge company.

PlayStation has made Sony tons of money since the PS4 and during that gen they did non acquire much, in fact the even closed a bunch of studios. MS even at their lowest was still making huge acquisitions like Minecraft. MS got to spend over $80B while Sony probably hardly broke past $5B.

I was always in favor of Sony buying SE/Capcom/FromSoftware as big fuck you to MS and protected at least Japanese devs from MS reach.
PlayStation got their last acquisition war chest as an investment from Sony Proper across all divisions to try to strengthen the gaming division, fam. That's how it works.


Mass consolidation is bad no matter who does it, though. That you seem to not care so long as it might have hurt the company you seem to hate is odd.
 

Swolf712

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29 Jun 2022
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Cod is a lost cause at this point

After 10 years agreement done its goodbye

Everyone here already knows that

Lets move on from that conversation

We are finished talking about cod
CoD was the main concern for Sony, like it or not. We're not going to be finished talking about it for a while, sadly.
 

Nhomnhom

Banned
25 Mar 2023
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PlayStation got their last acquisition war chest as an investment from Sony Proper across all divisions to try to strengthen the gaming division, fam. That's how it works.


Mass consolidation is bad no matter who does it, though. That you seem to not care so long as it might have hurt the company you seem to hate is odd.
MS sucks way more than Sony, Nintendo or Valve, why must I pretend I want them to control the direction of the market? Their vision for what games should be is and has always been awful.
 
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24 Jun 2022
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I'm both.

The hyperbole on this deal is out of control on this forum.

This is not the worst thing in the industry, gaming will continue, and you'll get to play all the games you love and will love.

Think about what ABK even is.

Activision: Call of Duty
Blizzard: WoW, Diablo, Overwatch,
King: Mobile stuff

Microsoft owning that is really going to change the industry for the worst, when Call of Duty is going back on Nintnedo and a bunch of cloud providers are going to get Call of Duty?

ABK barely release games as it is today.

It's not just for my payday if you read more of my post.

Better worker conditions and unionization, expansion of major brands to other consoles and services, and Game Pass.

Well if you have Game Pass the answer is obvious. For everyone else, Call of Duty would be going back to Nintendo and will be new to cloud providers.

The biggest IP ABK owns that isn't mobile is COD which is staying multiplatform. How does that harm the industry?

You're so naive to only look at this in terms of generic customer interests. ABK did not need MS to buy them to justify bringing COD back to Switch; they could have looked at bringing mobile COD Warfare to Switch instead.

MS buying Zenimax, so far, hasn't resulted in a SINGLE new game from Zenimax that wasn't already in the works pre-acquisition, or that they wouldn't have pursued if they were still on their own. If anything, it now means non-MS gamers get LESS Zenimax games, i.e MS renegotiating the terms of the Indiana Jones contract.

Where are the "better worker conditions" for the Zenimax teams? What IP outside of COD have MS or ABK even indicated expanding to new platforms? What good does COD staying multiplat matter if MS set licensing terms that squeeze out Sony's potential revenue & profits on that content access, and leverage other content in package deals to artificially increase the buying price for direct competitors as a result, which in turn actually harms customers as well?

Some of you really have not thought all of this through, or have already forgotten the intentions clearly expressed in leaked documents.
 

Swolf712

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29 Jun 2022
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MS sucks way more than Sony, Nintendo or Valve, why must I pretend I want them to control the direction of the market? Their vision for what games should be is and has always been awful.
And that's why they've been in last place. That doesn't mean you need to resort to anti-competitive measures and "kill them off".
 

Arminius

Well-known member
19 May 2023
252
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Once the judge made it into a MS vs. Sony thing as opposed to it being a cloud thing, I knew it was over. Corporations like MS are just too big to fail.
 
24 Jun 2022
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In the end, if the hobby becomes something I don’t enjoy, I’ll just leave it. I don’t care that much about western games, so as long as MS leave Japan alone, I don’t really care. What I’m afraid of is that they could try and buy sega and other Japanese publishers.

Hell, they want to do that. They've not just assessed Sega, also Square-Enix, one of Sony's strongest 3P partners.

Like I've said, if Sony don't do what they know has to be done, and thinks things will remain well just business as usual with some bloated GaaS push, then they deserve to fall into market irrelevancy. A lot of people calling @Nhomnhom a doomposter but he is right on that part.

Not saying Sony have to be egregious; just 1-2 key 3P acquisitions publisher-wise, a few among smaller 3P devs from various regions, and the rest towards buying big blocks of shares into the major 3P AAA and AA publishers (aka the Tencent strategy) and investments into a few of those (like they've done with Kadokawa and Epic).

If someone Sony don't do ANY of that, well can't say they haven't had warning signs ahead of time 🤷‍♂️

Once the judge made it into a MS vs. Sony thing as opposed to it being a cloud thing, I knew it was over. Corporations like MS are just too big to fail.

It was also the FTC's failure to not assume control of the discussion and tie the console concerns back into cloud, or as someone else mentioned here, make the argument about how the acquisition hurt customers instead of focusing on how it hurt Sony (or at least tie into how it would hurt customers by hurting Sony. At least that much).
 
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Nhomnhom

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25 Mar 2023
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And that's why they've been in last place. That doesn't mean you need to resort to anti-competitive measures and "kill them off".
Yes you do, if you know they are part of a company worth 2.5 trillion dollars known for their aggressive anti-competitive and corrupt practices. Sony should've known who they were dealing with. Seems like they fell for Phil Spencer bullshit act that couldn't even fool most people in this forum.

Both the Xbox One and Series are awful products, MS destroyed their internal studios, made countless terrible calls, yet Sony was more concerned with short term profits and were comfortable just having to compete with the terrible Xbox division and chose not to compete with Nintendo and PC.

Had Sony kept the attitude that resulted in the PS4, MS wouldn't even be thinking they had a chance to compete.
 

Loy310

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14 Aug 2022
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Once the judge made it into a MS vs. Sony thing as opposed to it being a cloud thing, I knew it was over. Corporations like MS are just too big to fail.
The ftc made it into sony vs ms and they sucked at making that case. Honestly the cma apparently folding means they cant prove their case either.
 

DForce

Well-known member
24 Jun 2022
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They're reporting that CMA has agreed with MS on a small divestiture.
Judge made a decision within weeks and now CMA will accept remedies in days before the deadline lol.

That's funny.