Microsoft / Activision Deal Approval Watch |OT| (MS/ABK close)

Do you believe the deal will be approved?

  • Yes, will be approved without changes.

    Votes: 221 24.9%

  • Yes, will be approved but with structural changes to ABK.

    Votes: 102 11.5%

  • Yes, will be approved but only with behavioral concessions.

    Votes: 262 29.6%

  • No, will not be approved.

    Votes: 301 34.0%
  • Total voters
    886
  • Poll closed .
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feynoob said:
Well well, look who we have here.


@DeepEnigma your friends are working hard.
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These guys are so transparent it hurts:

n0bHYt5.jpg
 
www.nytimes.com

Lina Khan, Aiming to Block Microsoft’s Activision Deal, Faces a Challenge

Ms. Khan, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, has staked an ambitious trustbusting agenda on a case that may be difficult to win.
www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
"It's undeniably a challenging lawsuit for the commission, because vertical challenges generally have an uphill battle," said Bill Baer, who led the Justice Department's antitrust division during the Obama administration and has represented Sony in private practice.

[...]

In meetings with the agency and commissioners on Wednesday, Microsoft offered to make enforceable, bound commitments to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation, a person with direct knowledge of the conversations said. But the commissioners did not seem interested in accepting a settlement, the person said.

Judges in some recent antitrust cases have cited settlement offers as a reason to allow mergers to proceed over regulators' objections. "Courts have been surprisingly solicitous about the kind of things that Microsoft has offered here," said Daniel Francis, an assistant professor of law at New York University and a former F.T.C. official.
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[QUOTE="feynoob, post: 267127473, member: 840272"
Explains why CMA decision is important for this deal.

[/QUOTE]

Don't know why they're all worried about the CMA. Microsoft can just turn the UK into a Third World country.
 
www.wsj.com

Microsoft Faces Tougher Path to Closing Activision Deal

The software giant should give up on the deal, some analysts said, following the FTC’s suit to block the planned $75 billion acquisition.
www.wsj.com www.wsj.com
The Federal Trade Commission's suit to block Microsoft Corp.'s MSFT -0.80%decrease; red down pointing triangle $75 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard Inc. ATVI 0.54%increase; green up pointing triangle puts the software giant in regulators' crosshairs and leaves the videogame developer in limbo.

Microsoft, after earlier offering concessions to regulators, is prepared to defend its purchase of the "Call of Duty" publisher in court, Microsoft's vice chairman and president, Brad Smith, said Thursday. Activision Chief Executive Bobby Kotick said the regulatory environment is focused on ideology and misconceptions.
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www.bloomberg.com

Microsoft’s Fight for Activision Is a Bet on the Future of Gaming

Cloud gaming is a nascent technology today but experts think it could eventually make consoles like the Xbox and PlayStation less relevant.
www.bloomberg.com www.bloomberg.com
"By now, regulators understand that big tech firms will seek to use their power in one market to capture downstream markets," said Vili Lehdonvirta, Oxford University professor of economic sociology and digital social research. "Microsoft doesn't quite dominate the public cloud market, but they have a big edge over cloud gaming rivals who don't own their own infrastructure and have to rent it from the cloud providers."

Sony has been a staunch opponent to Microsoft's deal, accusing the company of seeking to "lock in many consumers to Xbox" and leveraging its other products to "foreclose cloud gaming at a critical point of its evolution." Analysts question whether Sony's criticisms come from insecurity that the Japanese tech company lags behind Microsoft in diversifying away from console gaming. Sony typically releases its best first-party games onto PlayStation long before they appear anywhere else.

"If Sony is doubling down on its PlayStation business, that's potentially very problematic," said Joost Rietveld, an assistant professor of strategic management at the UCL School of management who has spoken to Microsoft and Sony representatives about the deal.
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Three said:
All you need to do is look at the big 4s biggest games to realise they have a point.

The listed games from the big third party publishers (this is by the EU in the Zenimax case):

Electronic Arts ("Fifa", "Need for Speed"), Activision Blizzard ("Call of Duty"), Take Two ("GTA V") and Ubisoft ("Assasin's Creed").

Ask yourself did their big AAA releases come to switch. Did Assasins Creed Valhalla release on Switch, did GTAV, did COD:MW2, did Need for Speed Unbound?

It's not difficult to see how the xbox and PlayStation are competing for sales of these third party AAA games whereas switch doesn't really apply in that market.
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There's a couple of contradictions there. FTC called the big 4 the "only" big publishers. That is inaccurate in itself.

Secondly, the big 4 publishers do put out games on Switch as well. Even if it's not the exact same 1 : 1.

Third, Switch competes in the sale retail spaces, gets counted in the same NPD/GSK tallies as the other two and games on it also compete against PS4/XBO on awards/GoTY etc.

They all compete in the same market against each other. And all of them have unique individuals and exclusives, that' drive the competition.

Are they technologically same ? no. But FTC's statements are trying to show that they don't compete in the same market, which is not true.
 
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Ass of Can Whooping said:
That's not a market. Be specific
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I don't know what kind of specificity you're looking for. All 3 console are competing for the same market share.

feynoob said:
These are websites, who report business data.

Market is where companies compete, with their products on the line.
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Yes, those sites report the results of the consoles selling in the same market.
 
adamsapple said:
Yes, those sites report the results of the consoles selling in the same market
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That is business data. Business data isn't a competition, it's a result.

Competition is like having to compete the same products.

The big 4 publishers products are being competed between Xbox and PS. Nintendo isn't a part of that competition.
 
Ass of Can Whooping said:
There we go. The FTC isn't claiming they aren't competing the in the video games sales market.

That's why I use crypitc one line questioning. it saves us from going in circles
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Yeah that's the point, FTC are reducing the market by taking out one of the core pillars of the video game market.

feynoob said:
The big 4 publishers products are being competed between Xbox and PS. Nintendo isn't a part of that competition.
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The big 4 do publish games on Switch, it's not like they've abandoned it.
 
Ass of Can Whooping said:
I'm asking you to name the market they're competing in
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Love how you clowns, to include the FTC, are now inventing competitive markets to support a disengenuous argument. It's really pathetic.

Also still waiting for my apologies for accurately calling out the FTC lies about MS EU broken commitments.
 
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Hendrick's said:
Love how you clowns, to include the FTC, are now inventing competitive markets to support a disengenuous argument. It's really pathetic.
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Submarkets exist. That's a fact of life.

Hendrick's said:
Also still waiting for my apologies for accurately calling out the FTC lies about MS EU broken commitments.
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You're late to the party. You should go back a couple of pages so you don't look even more stupid
 
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Ass of Can Whooping said:
They've done the opposite. They understand the video game sales market has submarkets. Which they do and is an important distinction.
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I don't think it really matters when the overall console market is still divided among the big 3.

No one talks about market share in the sense of "60% PS, 40% Xbox" "and also 100% Nintendo in their own sub-genre".
 
adamsapple said:
I don't think it really matters when the overall console market is still divided among the big 3.
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Okay, so you're not talking about the video games sales market then, you're talking a branch of it called the console market

Yes, these branches matter. Otherwise it wouldn't really matter to distinguish PC, mobiles or consoles either
 
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ToTTenTranz said:
Imagine being a self-proclaimed CEO showing such complete and utter ignorance over what they're talking about.
Sony of America has 33 000 employees and they've been pretty much running the Playstation / SIE division for almost 20 years now.
Most of Playstation's studios are located in the US, so a lot of their taxes are actually paid in the USA.



Microsoft on the other hand channels their international revenue towards tax haven subsidiaries like "Microsoft Global Finance", an Irish company with tax residency in Bermuda ($100B in investments, $0 in taxes) and "Microsoft Singapore Holdings" ($22B in profits, $15 [fifteen dollars] in taxes). Not to mention Puerto Rico:

VhCoNae.png





Whomever is suggesting that more money to Microsoft == more money to USA taxpayers is either ignorant or lying.
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He's not talking about Sony. This is about China.
 
James Sawyer Ford said:
What are you taking about?

Microsoft can do whatever they want with the studios they own, like Bethesda, but there's a precedent that had been sent by Microsoft making deceptive and conflicting statements. They said there was no incentive for them to make Bethesda games exclusive, and yet they did it anyway.

That act of deception is now grounds for blocking future acquisitions, especially when they are 10X the magnitude of the Bethesda deal

This has nothing to do with Sony trying to obtain a timed exclusivity deal
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That was a supposed time exclusive that could have lead to a buyout. Let's not forget the additional context. A publisher needs to show they've worked exclusively with said Publisher before they can make a purchase of a Publisher. Sony was working Bethesda for a potential knockout of MS by taking one of their best partners. It was a good plan until MS found out that Bethesda was looking to sell and they would prefer MS because they had worked with them so, closely to enter the console market.

Here's Jim Ryan in 2019 even hinting they were looking to purchase more content.

"We are always looking, but we are careful about who we look at and talk to. Buying studios right now is a very expensive undertaking. It is most definitely a seller's market. There is room for us to do more in that area, but we have to make sure that the company is right."

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/sonys-jim-ryan-we-had-to-make-changes-to-deliver-our-ps5-dream

Jim said this after MS announced all these Playground Games, Undead Labs, Ninja Theory, Compulsion Games, Obsidian Entertainment and InXile.

Sony started making moves on Bethesda games after this interview.
 
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