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- cross-posted to:
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Microsoft’s purchase of Activision Blizzard may go ahead in the United States, as Judge Corley sees no danger of harming competition.
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the judge ensures that it is clear that Microsoft’s intention is to bring the Call of Duty saga, and the rest of Activision’s content, to a greater number of consumers.
How can a judge be so naive?
Money
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It’s not naive, it’s the truth. They’re going to bring their games, including COD, to the switch, to steam, to mobile, and will keep releasing COD and other GaaS games on PS.
COD is already on Steam and mobile. The only new one there is Switch, which Kotick all but committed to making happen if Activision remained independent.
COD isn’t the only game that ABK make. I have no doubt Diablo etc will come to steam as well if the purchase goes through. Mobile is also new as well, not just switch, as well as nvidia streaming and the multitude of other streaming services.
COD was the example you chose to highlight… It’s also pretty damn close to it, here.
Activision: basically a COD factory only. COD has its own mobile version. Blizzard: Diablo, Overwatch, WoW. OW1+2 are on everything except mobile already. WoW doesn’t make sense to move beyond where it is. Diablo is on everything except Switch, and has its own mobile versions. Presumably the lack of a Switch release is a hardware issue, as D3 was on Switch.
King: mobile exclusively.Other than COD on Switch, which again Kotick all but committed to, what new platforms can they bring their games to? I’m not seeing it.
Maybe I needed to be more specific - by mobile I mean xCloud. They’ll be bringing the full console versions of those games to mobile devices via xCloud. I don’t care about COD mobile or Diablo mobile, but I’ll damn sure play MW2 or Diablo 4 via xCloud when I can’t play on my console.
little green pieces of paper make you naive
Fingers crossed the CMA aren’t swayed on it
Why? You want continued dominance by Sony? How does that benefit the consumer?
Taking over Activision and making CoD an exclusive down the line (I know the deal specifies not for a while, but it’s clear as soon as that period is up they’ll be making it an exclusive) is a negative move to combat that - it tries to combat dominance by introducing dominance
Microsoft should invest in their own exclusives to improve their own offering without affecting Sony, which would leave both in good positions, rather than taking offerings away from Sony which leaves both in mediocre positions.
It’s a 10 year deal. Sony can use that decade to invest in its own shooters like they used to with Killzone.
Sony refused to allow cross play for years, effectively making you buy a PS to play with your friends. They took cross platform MMOs like Destiny and made entire parts of it exclusive, stealing what should have been available to everyone who already paid.
Meanwhile Microsoft makes their stuff available on Steam, has nearly-full backcompat going back two decades, and gives me a path to play my games on phone.
Regulate Sony to not be so anti-competitive then, rather than turning Microsoft into them
Making COD exclusive isn’t happening. It would be a terrible business decision, just like making minecraft exclusive would be. COD is the highest selling game every single year. It’s a game that is filled with micro transactions, so the more people playing it the better.
But people will buy an XBox rather than a PS6/7 if they can’t play CoD on the latter… It’s not like people are already tied into a console 1-2 generations in the future, so this would influence what console people buy next.
With Minecraft most players play on PC and frankly taking it off Mac and Linux would make a lot of business sense for Microsoft, however as it’s Java and how easily modifiable and portable Java programs are, they know people would just get it working anyway. The same does not apply for CoD, where nearly everyone plays on console, and a significant part of what console someone buys is what games they can play on it.
Holy shit that sucks. Good thing the Indi-games scene is doing so well. I don’t really need the AAA publishers anymore.
The good that can come from this (imo) is that unlike Activision, Microsoft discounts their games on Steam according to their age while Activision (historically) has been very stingy on sales of old Call of Duty games.
To my knowledge, there are zero Blizzard games on Steam. Microsoft has been open to putting new games on Steam (starting with the Halo: Master Chief Collection).
So if MS follows it’s current practices with Activision/Blizzard games, it could be a good thing for gamers.
In the short term maybe but in the long term it’s just another corporation getting even bigger and swallowing up smaller corporations which doesn’t work out well for consumers.
Yeah I’m a bit fed up with cookie cutter design-by-committee experiences anyway. I hate how they skirt around anything meaningful for absolute fear of ever offending anyone in the slightest.
Gross.
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The major information that you can take away from this whole case, is just how much Call of Duty means to Sony, and gaming in general. Some stats came out that there were a good number of people who only play Call of Duty. I mean they own a PS5 and the only game they own and play is Call of Duty. For Sony, it’s a potential loss of a significant portion of their customer base.
This is going off memory, so there’s a good chance the number is off, but something like $800m of Sony’s yearly revenue is CoD. Something like 3 or 4% of their total playstation revenue
Because they weren’t the ones that got to buy Activision and Bethesda. If they were the games would still have been exclusives, just for Playstation instead of Xbox.
Every single gaming IP Sony has purchased pales in comparison to the sheer financial juggernaut that is COD. Purchasing Activision is bigger than all of Microsoft’s other gaming purchases combined. There’s a good chance it’s bigger than all of the gaming purchases from Sony and Microsoft pre-Activision — combined.
As a gaming entity, Activision is in the same ballpark in size as Sony. Sony’s market cap last I checked was ~$120b, but they also have a consumer electronics division, music division, movie division, image sensors division, etc. Without an acquisition markup Activision might be worth ~$50b today or so, and Sony’s gaming-only value might be in the $60-80b range if I had to guess.
Activision-Blizzard has about 17,000 employees. Naughty Dog has 400.
Past acquisitions — by anyone — in the gaming market are completely and utterly incomparable to this acquisition.
Why is Sony against this
Because Sony don’t want MS being more competitive, and owning ABK will do that.
I personally see this as bad. Look at all the local television stations getting bought up and have become “message deliverers”. There are only few companies that own the majority and have decided that delivering local news is secondary to deploying a message. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=\_fHfgU8oMSo]
I want all the the people responsible for the sexual harassment out of there as soon as that takeover is complete,Activision has needed a major change in management. Also happy that Sony’s arguments didn’t work considering they do the same things they accuse Microsoft of doing
I know people dislike mergers for good reason but in all honesty I’ve been wanting this to just go through just so I can know whether they boot Kotick out. If they don’t… boo.
I don’t have any interest in CoD anymore. There are a few IPs I’d like to see explored though that Activision has been sitting on and ignoring. And some that Activision “might” own that they’ve been too lazy to check but still threaten to litigate if it turns out that they do own (No One Lives Forever).
Didn’t the UK reject it though? What happened there?
They announced that they’re negotiating a deal with Microsoft. They’ll get some new small concession for PR purposes, but it’s clear this deal is 100% going to happen in the next week.
Pretty shit news.
CMA have just agreed to negotiate with Microsoft. It sounds like the UK approval is forthcoming too.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/11/23791149/microsoft-activision-blizzard-uk-regulators-cma-appeal
Can someone help me to understand why this is a bad (or good) thing. In my mind, Activision is huge - I’m having a hard time understanding what the difference will be here?
Xbox exclusivity.
While I agree that in the end this is probably not good in the long run, I do hope they do something with the state of Call of Duty, activision has killed the franchise. Just look at the latest warzone / MW player count.
I used to enjoy playing with my friends. But the game is so broken.
I do think Phil Schiller is a good guy, let’s hope this doesn’t go sideways.
Maybe I’m being naive… only time will tell.
activision has killed the franchise. Just look at the latest warzone / MW player count.
COD MWII is one of the franchises biggest selling titles, and Warzone is an absolute smash hit. What are you talking about? MWII is the second most played game on xbox live, behind only fortnite.
I kinda want to play a Microsoft flight sim/WoW mashup
Yoo that’s fantastic news, let’s frickin go
Imagine cheering for monopolistic practices. Gross. In 20 years when everything is owned by Microsoft and Sony and games are $200 a piece or gamepass $40 a month don’t complain.
What’s monopolistic about the last placed competitor buying a company to try and better compete?
what’s not monopolistic about the second largest company in the world buying two out of like 10 major AAA publishers within 3 years, leveraging their massive market cap and other businesses to muscle their way to the top of an industry they’re currently losing in? The point isn’t that they’re in last place, the point is if they go buy out half the industry they will win by default. I mean fuck dude they literally talked about using microsoft’s money to run sony out of the business, you can go read it.
You don’t need to simp for the a two and a half trillion dollar company, they’ll be fine.
what’s not monopolistic about
Literally the fact that they don’t have a monopoly, and are still nowhere near being a monopoly. Do you even know what a monopoly is?
I mean fuck dude they literally talked about using microsoft’s money to run sony out of the business, you can go read it.
They said that they could, which is true. They haven’t though. Even then - not monopolistic.
The company in 3rd place out of 3 cannot be a monopoly lol.
They are trying to become one
And you don’t stop a purchase by the last placed competitor based on that. Every for-profit company in the world wants to become a monopoly.
Why, what benefits do you get from this?
