Sony Gaming Unit Adds Uber Antitrust Lawyer Amid Expansion Plans

[DynamiteCop]

Give it up will you.

You are just arguing for the sake of arguing.

What you just posted is complete gibberish.

It's not, Take Two is only gaming, the entirety of their company is gaming. Plopping down 60% of their company for an acquisition is logical.

For Sony gaming is one aspect of several in their business, they can't drop 40% of their company on something for gaming because it would starve their other industries.

Don't be obtuse as if you can't understand this.

 

[Muddasar]

It's not, Take Two is only gaming, the entirety of their company is gaming. Plopping down 60% of their company for an acquisition is logical.

For Sony gaming is one aspect of several in their business, they can't drop 40% of their company on something for gaming because it would starve their other industries.

Don't be obtuse as if you can't understand this.

Nobody can understand you because it is nonsense.

Like I said, you argue for the sake of arguing.

 

[DynamiteCop]

Nobody can understand you because it is nonsense.

Like I said, you argue for the sake of arguing.

You have no counter. Take Two is a singular, Sony is not, they can't afford a merger on that level as they would have to steal capital from their numerous other business ventures.

It's simple, ya dig?

 

[Remember_Spinal]

Whoever gets bought peopel are gonna be maaaad

 

[Midn1ght]

Epic / EGS.

I don’t know man. 30 billion for Fortnite/Rocket League/Fall Guys and an unsustainable storefront seems like an awful deal to me.

That money could be better used elsewhere.

 

[Muddasar]

It's not, Take Two is only gaming, the entirety of their company is gaming. Plopping down 60% of their company for an acquisition is logical.

For Sony gaming is one aspect of several in their business, they can't drop 40% of their company on something for gaming because it would starve their other industries.

Don't be obtuse as if you can't understand this.

First you said Sony can't purchase Epic because they are a 1/3 of the value of the Entire Sony company.

Then I gave you Take 2 and Zynga example. Zynga being 2/3 of Take 2 value yet Take 2 managed to purchase them.

Then you decide to say that's because Take 2 is a holding company.

Little did you know Sony is also a holding company.

Rather than give it up, all of a sudden because Sony is a conglomerate they can't put all that money in one division.

You argue for the sake of it.

 

[Bryank75]

I don’t man. 30 billion for Fortnite/Rocket League/Fall Guys and an unsustainable storefront seems like an awful deal to me.

It's all about the users... Fortnite is massive

Then the game engine and adding PSPlus to EGS and pushing for market share against others on PC.

Plus I think they would just buy 51% of the company for now....giving them control.

 

[DynamiteCop]

I don’t man. 30 billion for Fortnite/Rocket League/Fall Guys and an unsustainable storefront seems like an awful deal to me.

Not to mention their mental midget logic and double think these guys have.

Yes, they preach to no end that Sony is never going to release their games day and date on PC, yet the loons believe Sony is about to plop down $40 billion on Epic and EGS to not release games day and date ultimately losing them heaps of cash.

"Here's our new storefront guys, we'll get this new game to you in a few years!"

Sony fanatical logic ladies and gentlemen.

 

[Midn1ght]

It's all about the users... Fortnite is massive

Then the game engine and adding PSPlus to EGS and pushing for market share against others on PC.

Plus I think they would just buy 51% of the company for now....giving them control.

I just don’t know if Fortnite has Minecraft kind of legs.

Would be weird for them to own EGS and not drop their first party day one. Also, would they stop giving free games on EGS and lock that down behind a PC/PS monthly subscription? The EGS is already shit as it is, i can’t see a move like this make it any better.

Fortnite is a gold mine, but other than that, Epic has not much to offer and 30 billion is a lot of fucking money they could use elsewhere.

 

[Yobo]

You have no counter. Take Two is a singular, Sony is not, they can't afford a merger on that level as they would have to steal capital from their numerous other business ventures.

It's simple, ya dig?

By that logic MS Games can't afford it either, but that's simply not true is it? Disney should not have been able to afford Fox, seeing as they had to leverage debt to do it. Conglomerates frequently feed into large scale investments in a single sector of their business

 

[kyliethicc]

Jimbo is preparing to buy Nintendo

 

[arvfab]

I don’t know man. 30 billion for Fortnite/Rocket League/Fall Guys and an unsustainable storefront seems like an awful deal to me.

That money could be better used elsewhere.

I also think 30b would be too much anyway, but you are forgetting that EPIC comes with Unreal Engine and with it the income for licensing it.

 

[Savant]

You argue for the sake of it.

That's giving him too much credit. He argues because he's an xbot and a fool who genuinely believes "he knows better."

 

[LightBolt]

Sony is buying Uber guys....

 

[nominedomine]

I can’t see Gabe selling. Not that he doesn’t like money, but the whole philosophy at Valve is creating an open source environment, being customer friendly (to an extend) and the website content is mainly users generated.

As cool as the PlayStation brand is, the way they manage their store has always been a mess and they’re not really known in the industry as the most customer friendly entity. Furthermore, they’re just used to make their gaming business in a locked/controlled environnement. I can’t see them being any good at managing the most open and popular PC storefront.

My bet is on Square or Ubisoft.

The main point of aquiring Valve would be to let Steam be integrated and pretty much replace the PlayStation store over.

Gabe selling to MS would be a huge stab in the back to the PC comunity making them even more ependent of MS. Tencent should be out of the question.

 

[Remember_Spinal]

Square enix is probably the only publisher i can see sony buying at this point.

I dont think the big 3 remaining western pubs make sense financially but who knows because they all keep talking about potentially selling and how they are tight on money. I just dont see what sony would get out of take two or ubisoft.

EA might make sense with sonys push into E Sports

 

[Remember_Spinal]

This was posted on Era, I’ll keep the name anonymous:

About this.
A friend on discord that works on this type of deals said this after reading it. He gave me permision to quote him btw.

"So Uber for the last 10-15 years or so went through legal hell, because they were aggressively expanding in so many new markets, and often had to battle with local politicians to even get approved.
Not to mention, taxi workers and taxi unions, they were basically getting blocked left and right and often sued.
But they managed to "win" in the end and get Uber running in those countries and cities, they needed a really really good legal team to pull all of that of.
So this guy must be really really good. This guy was basically fighting to keep uber alive while it was getting sued every day.
This is a big hire for playstation, and this is a guy who clearly knows his stuff. By that i mean what is allowed and what isn't allowed, and how to get around limitations with certain "loopholes" which uber's legal team is famous for.
Sony is planning something big, something they know will trigger an antitrust investigation or lawsuit and they are preparing for it in advance, by hiring someone who knows how to deal with that."

 

[Yurinka]

Square enix is probably the only publisher i can see sony buying at this point.

I dont think the big 3 remaining western pubs make sense financially but who knows because they all keep talking about potentially selling and how they are tight on money. I just dont see what sony would get out of take two or ubisoft.

EA might make sense with sonys push into E Sports

I think they would be appealing for many different reasons, but I think there are 3 main reasons of why I Sony won't buy them:

1. EA and Take 2 have a market cap of 20-30B, maybe too expensive for Sony
2. At least Ubisoft doesn't want to sell, specially to someone who would affect their plans (they partner with and support every single gaming platform under the sun) and creative freedom
3. All 3 are in a good finantial position in a long term growing revenue trend with no important debts (which means that pretty likely their value will grow in the following years). Don't need to sell

But well, this also can be said for many companies acquired, or other companies who could be potentially acquired like Square Enix, Capcom or Bandai Namco and even if I think we don't have their numers, Epic or Valve. So who knows.

 

[Muddasar]

I think they would be appealing for many different reasons, but I think there are 3 main reasons of why I Sony won't buy them:

1. EA and Take 2 have a market cap of 20-30B, maybe too expensive for Sony
2. At least Ubisoft doesn't want to sell, specially to someone who would affect their plans (they partner with and support every single gaming platform under the sun) and creative freedom
3. All 3 are in a good finantial position in a long term growing revenue trend with no important debts (which means that pretty likely their value will grow in the following years). Don't need to sell

Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't it more likely Sony is trying to acquire a Western publisher.

Why would Sony need an Uber Antitrust lawyer for Japan?

 

[Yurinka]

Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't it more likely Sony is trying to acquire a Western publisher.

Why would Sony need an Uber Antitrust lawyer for Japan?

There are antitrust laws and different regulators all around the world. The companies don't need to be of that specific country or region to have issues with them. As an example, Microsoft, Google, Facebook o Apple had issues with European regulators of different kinds even if they weren't acquiring and aren't Europeans.

In theory these regulators basically take care that in their country/region there aren't monopolies and that their is some fair competition. As mentioned above, this lawyer had to deal with Uber legal issues all around the world, not only in USA. As an example here in my city/country Uber had several issues with normal taxis and local laws were changed to keep Uber out of the business in certain areas/cases.

And well, there are some cases like USA or China, where the government can block acquisitions of big companies of their countries when bought by foreigners. As an example, NetEase would be very appealing for Sony: bigger revenue than Activision Blizzard, EA or Take 2, huge in mobile, PC, F2P and GaaS, huge in Asia, a gaming market where Sony wants to grow. But in addition to being very likely too expensive for Sony, the Chinese government probably wouldn't let foreigners buy it. It has 18K employees, has a ton of assets and generates a ton of revenue (so they pay a lot of taxes there).

The thing is Sony may be market leader in different markets and since they plan to grow in basically all of them they may start to have antitrust issues. Examples of markets where Sony is or may be market leader:

• Consoles, with almost half of the market share
• Particularly its digital console games store compared to the other ones
• Game subscriptions
• Cloud gaming? (we don't have numbers of their competitors)
• VR gaming? (we don't have numbers of their competitors)
• Depending who they buy (let's say they buy 2 or 3 top companies) and considering their growth, they may become the overal top 1 company in gaming revenue passing Tencent in a few years