It seems like they want to buy almost everyone these days...
Sega, ABK, Zenimax, Zynga, Bungie, IOI and who knows what has been added since to this watchlist.
Don't forget, they apparently made Square-Enix an offer, too.
Out of the Japanese publishers the only one they would have any realistic shot with is Sega-Sammy, but even there we are talking a less than 5% chance. What idiot cheerleaders for MS's mass consolidation strategy don't understand is, these deals are about WAY more than what amount of money Microsoft can flash in the face of a publisher.
When Sony brought Bungie I had the feel it was a forced move... like if Sony didn't buy them then other will.
And Bungie is basically one of the big pillars in revenue for the game industry today.
Sony could not not allow to lose them.
That was my feeling.... can be wrong of course.
Sony is not used to buy big studios/publishers... they buys smaller ones that do good games and so with Sony money they can reach others levels.
The timing for this actually lines up with your claims, as the email was November 2020, and clearly continues off from the 2019 email oh I mean "thought experiment".
MS likely approached Bungie with an offer for acquisition, and Bungie rejected. They might've then told Sony about that offer, and Sony made their own with Bungie stipulating certain conditions such as continued multiplatform support, and Sony agreed.
I'm very certain Bungie made those same stipulations to Microsoft, who very likely rejected them, and thus the deal fell apart. What we've learned what MS wanted to do with Minecraft all along
more than supports that theory, too.
100%. Phil was probably getting his ideas from Resetera all along, explains why he sucks so much.
Nadella must be a really credulous guy to still be trusting Phil Spencer to be in charge of Xbox or even Gamepass to be the answer for that division.
Major Nelson still posts there so you likely aren't far off.
After today's reveal that Microsoft royally screwed things on the Perfect Dark reboot this doesn't come as a surprise.
Yeah. The theme seems to be, they initially did smaller studio acquisitions thinking XGS management was sufficient. Instead most of the games from those studios are taking forever or have ran into a lot of problems. Perfect Dark, Everwild, Fable, State of Decay 3 just to name a few. Rather than firing Matt Booty and getting someone else in charge, MS just wrote out an email part of a plan initialized in 2019 to "put PlayStation out of business".
And that plan obviously includes attempts to acquire 3P publishers with the strongest relationships to Sony. That's why they approached Square-Enix with an offer. That's why they were trying to do the same with Sega (when that one failed, it rolled into a strategic partnership with the Azure department, with Xbox getting obvious benefits). It's why they purchased Zenimax off the rumor a paywall-locking unconfirmed source of Sony looking to do some type of deal for Starfield.
These publisher acquisitions, for MS, are really about a combination of locking 3P support into their ecosystem over all other competitors through the surefire means of just outright buying them, and fully controlling "the supply and the supplier", the supply being the 3P games and the supplier being the 3P developer & publisher for that developer. Every additional 3P publisher they acquire is one less a competitor like Sony can rely on towards working on software, partnerships etc. to the benefit of the PS platform and its customers.
More 3P publishers under MS's belt also allows them to leverage their IP, technologies and resources to force competitors into lopsided agreements with questionable terms, force competitors to relinquish on the few remaining distinguishing factors that give them a competitive advantage (such as certain confidential hardware design plans, if the competitor needs software to be ready for it Day 1, as MS can just access those design & market plans through their studios, kind of like copying someone else's homework to cheat), and create a dynamic where competitors are heavily dependent on another direct competitor for content access.
If Microsoft didn't have a history of leveraging their money advantages and software advantages to squeeze competitors out through anticompetitive practices like predatory pricing and price shifting, didn't violate behavioral remedies rather regularly, and didn't have a 2019 email stating a plan to drive PlayStation out of business backed up with big 3P publisher acquisitions (plus talk of buying more after ABK, and new evidence showing other targets they approached before and would very likely attempt buying again in the near future), then maybe these concerns wouldn't need to exist. However, the reality is that MS
have done those things, and there's way more reason to suspect they'd do it again versus just suddenly stopping.
After all, it's in their corporate DNA.
