I really don't get why the entire MS gaming business isn't being investigated. I think a core issue should be a huge trillionare company leveraging massive profits from other segments to dominate markets by ways of acquisitions without costumers having any say.
It's such a shame that regulators are so weak, this shit should've been blocked on every country unless MS has some excellent justification on why they needed this.
This is something I've mentioned in the past. Even other major tech companies of their day like NEC pulled out of gaming after a single failure (PC-FX). Same with Panasonic/Matsushita with the 3DO. Sony would have done the same if PS1 ended up bombing, despite being notably bigger than Nintendo and Sega at that time.
Microsoft have been using the Netflix model in gaming since the get-go and while it's one thing to leverage resources and profits from other divisions to help get a new division up and going (after all, Sony did this for the PS1), most
normal companies intend for that new division to eventually become self-sustaining, as in able to generate its own profits, within a reasonable amount of time. 22 years is not a reasonable amount of time unless you can continuously leverage profits from other parts of the company to sustain mounting losses in a less-critical market in ways that can bleed competitors out on no other merits besides having less money.
The only time this would have worked for Microsoft in a way that could arguably be considered "fair" was the 360 era, because while doing just as described, Sony actually did make several mistakes of their own early on, causing self-inflicted damage. But Microsoft did not capitalize, and lost that opportunity. Now they're leveraging market valuation and profits from Windows, Azure and Office to finance the largest gaming acquisition in history, in order to artificially boost their gaming revenue and starve a competitor of content (and free access to that content i.e without the ownership of another platform holder/competitor getting in the way).
No matter what Satya Nadella or anyone else at Microsoft want to say, that is not "competition".
Lets also recall Phil Spencer's recent interview “There is no world where Starfield is an 11 out of 10 and people start selling their PS5's that’s not going to happen.”
Odd comment right?! why is Phil trying to get people to sell their PS5. Well you just got a glimpse into MS internal thinking. Starfield will not move the needle but owning and restricting COD in some way could make people sell their PS5's. So there's another plan in jeopardy.
That line always bothered me because in the context of that interview and knowing where Xbox is today, he should've said there's no world where Starfield's an 11 out of 10 and people go out to buy an Xbox. It just goes to show how much some Xbox fanatics pretend otherwise, Microsoft themselves very much still see Sony and PlayStation as a competitor, and I think they see them as such because they are a stepping stone towards taking on companies like Apple and Google in gaming.
Out of three, they assume Sony would be the "easiest" to dismantle and as you said, COD ownership is the key way they want to accomplish that. Then combined with ownership of other ABK IP, alongside what they already purchased in Zenimax, and some of their pre-publisher acquisitions, that starts to create an easy way to go after a chief rival in the core console gaming market. That's in addition to mentions of even more acquisitions (or at least the intention) from Microsoft, while it seems Sony are leaning in the opposite direction of that type of strategy.
It's also just funny to hear Phil Spencer say they can never "out-console" Sony or Nintendo but then in the same interview show they still have the yearning of outselling PlayStation and outstripping it in market share.
