Come on, don't try and make out Sony didn't feed the CMA all those concerns. Sony did the exact same thing to Brazil, the FTC and the EU. The CMA has demonstrated they know very little about the gaming industry and almost followed Sony's submission to a tee.
I'm not sure why you don't want to admit that Sony played a big hand in it.
Not all regulators have said the same thing as the CMA. The Brazilian regulator said that its not the role of a regulator to protect the interests of the dominate player in a market.
I don't care what CADE has to say, they approved it unconditionally. The 3 major regulatory bodies all had objections to the deal, the FTC has sued to block it outright (the same FTC who fanboys thought would approve it by August of last year), the EU had objections to which Microsoft responded to, so we're waiting on a ruling for that & the CMA also had concerns regarding CoD & cloud gaming & offered divestiture as a remedy, to which Microsoft already said no. The CMA put out a well-detailed report & I was surprised by how much they understood the industry.
I don't know why you're acting like I'm refusing Sony played a big part in this, I remember the fanboys on this very forum were talking about how the deal was gonna through without a hitch & Sony wouldn't be able to do anything to stop it. And yet here we are, yea no shit it's not a shocker Sony's the main opposition to the deal for obvious reasons. That's been a well-known fact since the very beginning & their strategy is working so far, so much for the "Microsoft will bribe the regulators to get it through" crowd.
Sony has no moral high ground with taking content away from other platforms.
The issue with alot of Sony players is that until now you had everything going your way. The line share of top exclusives. Sony had the more higher rated first party studios. More consoles sold.
Lmao, "everything going your way." The bolded part still remains true, Sony heavily invested in their first-party over time & churned out some quality titles including some of the best games from last-gen. TLOU, TLOU2, God of War, Ghost of Tsushima, Marvel's Spider-Man, Death Stranding, Bloodborne & etc. Games like Returnal (new IP) & Spider-Man were funded & published by Sony themselves with Housemarque & Insomniac who were third-parties at the time before they got acquired after the games were successful. Look at how much of a powerhouse Insomniac became now with their insane output already this gen, an absolute steal for Sony for just $230M, that's how it's done.
The result of those investments they made paid dividends for them as the consumers (including me) & the market chose them over Xbox because of what they had to offer, they earned the market share they have today because they learned from their past mistakes & actually invested in their first-party output. All of these IP's (with the exception of Spider-Man which funny enough Phil passed on when Marvel asked) were formed under Sony, they weren't taken away from other platforms like you keep whining about. No one was complaining when Xbox acquired studios like Ninja Theory or Playground, PS players started complaining when publishers like Bethesda were acquired & they found out games like Starfield, the next Fallout & Elder Scrolls will be permanently yanked off PlayStation, which is exactly what Microsoft plans to do with Call of Duty if the deal goes through.
Now tell me, what major multiplat IP did Sony recently take away from Xbox permanently & called it first-party?
It gave them a opportunity to shit on MS with the usual cries of "xbox has no games" "MS wont use Office money to prop up Xbox" "If you want to play a Sony exclusive game, buy a Playstation" and so on.
It ain't Sony's fault Phil sucked at his job when it came to investing in their own first-party output last-gen, take it up with him.
It's changed again. MS is a big deal in gaming now. Even if ABK goes through, MS is going to grow even more with further acquisitions.
It doesn't matter if people don't like it.
They've been in the industry for 2 decades now & have always been a major player alongside Sony, they didn't just become a "big deal" over night because of a $69 billion deal that has yet to even go through. No one's gonna care if MS continues acquiring studios the way Sony has been doing now, as long as big publishers aren't being bought out resulting in established IP's being taken away from the competing platform. I still don't know what the fuck Phil's doing & why Asobo Studio hasn't been acquired yet, they're a capable developer who have a lot of potential under Xbox first-party. I've played both Plague Tale games on PS & they were great.
MS doesn't care about stupid little rules fanboys put out there like "you shouldn't be allowed to buy publsihers"
Don't worry, regulators will do their jobs. They'll care then, just like how they went from thinking no concessions would be needed for ABK, to signing all these licensing deals with other companies & offering Sony a 3-year CoD licensing deal before upping that to 10 years after more unexpected regulatory scrutiny. I guarantee you they won't think about acquiring any major publishers after this ABK mess gets resolved, that's the one good thing to come out of this deal.
all while forgetting that Sony bought publishers when Sega couldn't afford to buy them.
Not this shit again...
