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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ChorizoPicozo said:
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Thirty7ven said:
You are implying that because Sony is the market leader they can't make deals. Similar to people implying that they can't buy a publisher because they are market leaders. On the same token MS can do all the type of deals they want because they aren't market leaders. Effectively they could buy everything and everyone until they are market leaders?

The logic doesn't hold up. Sony doesn't tell third parties that either they accept their deals or their games won't be on PlayStation. Therefore they are not leveraging their market position.

Using market position means doing something only your market position allows you. Nothing stops MS from making those deals, and after spending 75B on the biggest IPs you can't defend the concept that it's not financially feasible.
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If anything regulators will allow Sony to compete within their means.
 
phil_t98 said:
Exactly this! and that's why the activist deal is, its just business.
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Yeh it would be if not for the fact that they are exercising their dominant position in other unrelated business areas in order to buy important industry property and force consumers to give them money.

If Xbox was it's own entity and not backed by Microsoft or any other US big tech then we wouldn't even be having this discussion. That in itself is telling.
 
GHG said:
It's fucking business. What do you expect Sony to do? You want them to play nice? Should they tell publishers/developers they want to overpay for the deals they agree to? Tell publishers/developers that they shouldn't see the opportunity in having their product(s) being heavily marketed to one of the largest and most active console userbases? Tell publishers/developers not to agree to the terms set out in contracts even if they are happy to do so?

It's up to their competition to bring something to the table that differentiates themselves and makes them attracting both to potential customers and to potential business partners. If they have something unique then it circumvents anything Sony could ever do to make things more difficult for them. That's what everyone's favourite word "competition" is supposed to breed.

Some of you are just as soft and spineless as the current leadership at Xbox. You never heard any of this crap when Peter Moore was in charge. You never heard him cry, he just got on with the job and did what was necessary to make waves and do deals. It's no coincidence that he's built tremendous success everywhere he's been since.
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It's the new victimhood currency at play in current year. And those who are the most privileged leverage that card more often than not.
 
GHG said:
It's fucking business. What do you expect Sony to do? You want them to play nice? Should they tell publishers/developers they want to overpay for the deals they agree to? Tell publishers/developers that they shouldn't see the opportunity in having their product(s) being heavily marketed to one of the largest and most active console userbases? Tell publishers/developers not to agree to the terms set out in contracts even if they are happy to do so?

It's up to their competition to bring something to the table that differentiates themselves and makes them attracting both to potential customers and to potential business partners. If they have something unique then it circumvents anything Sony could ever do to make things more difficult for them. That's what everyone's favourite word "competition" is supposed to breed.

Some of you are just as soft and spineless as the current leadership at Xbox. You never heard any of this crap when Peter Moore was in charge. You never heard him cry, he just got on with the job and did what was necessary to make waves and do deals. It's no coincidence that he's built tremendous success everywhere he's been since.
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I guess Peter Moore was the reason I ever got a 360, I couldn't not play the GTAIV DLC when it came out, so I had to get a 360. I took solace in the fact that I never actually bought the game, if I remember right I just played it off my friends HDD which could just be attached to my console and it worked, so at that point they probably lost money on me, although it was a smart move because I've given them some money since.
 
GHG said:
Yeh it would be if not for the fact that they are exercising their dominant position in other unrelated business areas in order to buy important industry property and force consumers to give them money.

If Xbox was it's own entity and not backed by Microsoft or any other US big tech then we wouldn't even be having this discussion. That in itself is telling.
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They're also 'leveraging their dominance' in other unrelated business areas to bolster the gaming division.

It's just business.
 
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DeepEnigma said:
It's the new victimhood currency at play in current year. And those who are the most privileged leverage that card more often than not.
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That's rich saying the side who loses large studio-publisher games all the time is the privileged side. It's like those who complain when poor people don't pay taxes and how good they have it.
 
GHG said:
Yeh it would be if not for the fact that they are exercising their dominant position in other unrelated business areas in order to buy important industry property and force consumers to give them money.

If Xbox was it's own entity and not backed by Microsoft or any other US big tech then we wouldn't even be having this discussion. That in itself is telling.
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If Xbox was by itself it wouldn't exist.

It takes huge amounts of money and capital to break into this industry with entrenched players. If it was so easy everyone else including EA, Apple, Valve, etc.. would have had some success.

That in itself is telling.
 
BrutalTruth_ said:
Literally shaking my head at that irony.

It's just business for MS too.
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Just business would be doing deals on terms that publishers/developers are happy to agree to, making products that customers actually want and making games that customers actually want.

Unfortunately, other than the period I outlined in my previous post they have failed to do that on the whole. Hence this is where we are. Crying to the press, crying to their government to investigate what happens in Japan, crying to regulators, crying about their competition and even crying about their potential customers. Over 20 years in the industry and this is the sorry state they've got themselves into, where they have no choice but go all in on a loss-leader strategy and pair it with a 70 billion dollar acquisition.

And to think, all of this could have been so easily avoided if they just built on the blueprint from the formative Xbox 360 days and managed their IP/Studios/Developers appropriately. Maybe some of you are not old enough to remember, but Halo was once bigger than Call of Duty, Gears of War arrived as a new IP and took the industry by storm, they went to Japan and got exclusive games/partnerships (they even got an exclusive Bomberman game ffs, which they somehow fucked up) - they had the tools to do it, and they were doing it. It's not my fault if the current fanbase want to celebrate and embrace mediocrity along with weak limp-dick leadership.
 
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GHG said:
Just business would be doing deals on terms that publishers/developers are happy to agree to, making products that customers actually want and making games that customers actually want.

Unfortunately, other than the period I outlined in my previous post they have failed to do that on the whole. Hence this is where we are. Crying to the press, crying to their government to investigate what happens in Japan, crying to regulators, crying about their competition and even crying about their potential customers. Over 20 years in the industry and this is the sorry state they've got themselves into, where they have no choice but go all in on a loss-leader strategy and pair it with a 70 billion dollar acquisition.

And to think, all of this could have been so easily avoided if they just built on the blueprint from the formative Xbox 360 days and managed their IP/Studios/Developers appropriately. Maybe some of you are not old enough to remember, but Halo was once bigger than Call of Duty - they had the tools to do it, and they were doing it. It's not my fault if the current fanbase want to celebrate and embrace mediocrity along with weak limp-dick lealeadership.
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You don't get it Phil's a gamer like me. It's sonys fault halo has stagnated because spiderman.
 
quest said:
That's rich saying the side who loses large studio-publisher games all the time is the privileged side. It's like those who complain when poor people don't pay taxes and how good they have it.
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Being one of the richest companies in the world, and then crying victim for their own failures, yes, that constitutes a great laugh.
 
ulantan said:
You don't get it Phil's a gamer like me. It's sonys fault halo has stagnated because spiderman.
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Sony also planted Don Mattrick and then made a more attractive smooth talking clone in Phil Spencer.

Have you seen their robotics division? Unstoppable. Biden must do something.
 
DeepEnigma said:
Being one of the richest companies in the world, and then crying victim for their own failures, yes, that constitutes a great laugh.
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Crying victim i say its just business. Sony wanted the high power console market to stop the deal. Microsoft is now using that against them. Sony was not playing chess with that move for sure.
 
GHG said:
Sony also planted Don Mattrick and then made a more attractive smooth talking clone in Phil Spencer.

Have you seen their robotics division? Unstoppable. Biden must do something.
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At least that guy made Xbox devs work, even though he was a trainwreck.
Phil could never be like him.
 
feynoob said:
At least that guy made Xbox devs work, even though he was a trainwreck.
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People are quick to forget this. The Xbox One actually launched with exclusive games and had a pipeline of games in it's early years. At least it looked like they were trying (without needing to go on an acquisition spree, imagine that), even if the chef at the time (who was none other than Phil Spencer, funny that) was asleep in the kitchen.
 
Ozriel said:
Well, they can pretty much only make AAA FF games once every 4-5 years. They need to fill in the gaps with smaller projects.

Limiting their platforms for AAA games doesn't help.
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With Forspoken, they attempted to create a big project to appeal to Western audiences without understanding who their Western audience actually is. They did it on a badly optimized engine that, thankfully, was avoided in all of their other projects. Virtually anyone here could have listened to that pitch and told them it was a bad idea. They created an entire studio around a questionable engine with a team whose lead left the company not all that long afterwards. To make matters worse, they allowed the game, a brand new IP with an already shakey premise, to be console exclusive for two years instead of giving it the most opportunity to find an audience. This game should have at least been created for Switch as well, as it has, by far, the greatest install base of the three consoles currently on offer. Which would mean abandoning the engine and their incessant need to push visuals, which they weren't even that great at, to the expense of everything else. This would have also made the game more than capable of being on PS4 as well.

Then there's situations like Marvel Avengers, which apparently had a budget of $100 million. I think anyone who saw or played that game could tell you that SE grossly overpaid for what they got. They banked on that game selling because of the name and that it would be good because Crystal Dynamics was making it. They almost undoubtedly spent the same or similar amount on Guardians of the Galaxy, which was being developed at the same time and released the following year. That didn't pan out either, according to them. Considering that these were multiplatform games made by solid developers using some Marvel IP, which are/were huge in the West, and at least one of them scored well with critics, SE was almost certainly not only shocked by the inability of these games to turn them a good profit, but likely felt more vindicated by their deals with Sony, as they represented a safe harbor.

Now, there are some things you just cannot know until it's too late and you simply use it to inform you on the next project. Like how Babylon's Fall was going to be royally fucked up by Platinum Games. But there are others, again, like Forspoken, that a competent manager would have avoided. Thankfully for them, they are much more streamlined now and putting focus on their SE teams instead of any subsidiaries. Not hard when you really only have one left that you haven't sold or rolled back into the parent company yet. Though I see that coming soon. Two of their internal teams are nailing it so far with the FF7 remake, FF14, and FF16, which seems to have generated a good bit of excitement. Regardless of any personal views on the games, of course. Another of their teams is currently working on the next Dragon Quest. Which is huge in Japan and sells several million copies there soon after release. So, SE is fine for now and have little reason to spend resources to put all games on all platforms immediately.
 
GHG said:
If it were actually "just business" then this would have occurred:
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But why separate the division from its parent company which created/funds it ? That's such an arbitrary distinction.

You don't think Sony, as a company, funnels money into Playstation from other divisions or vice versa ?

Like you said, it's a business and MS are making a business deal with this Activision acquisition as any business with that kind of capital would.
 
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wolffy71 said:
These guys don't think this way. If they did they wouldn't sell Destiny's or minecraft respectively
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They aren't really the same. Xbox only wins from having Destiny on the platform, and the same with Minecraft on PlayStation, as neither game has the needle moving impact of CoD so are merely bringing in extra revenue to the other platform and expanding the gaming portfolio on each system.

CoD is the crown jewel of a publisher - according to this thread - worth 31x its yearly profit, and PlayStation being hog tied to continue to promote/market that game for three years, when it would have been advantageous to devalue that $70b publisher post-acquisition in response to MSFT acquiring it to pave the way for a new third party game to take its place IMHO would be a more powerful move than waiting for the MSFT axe to drop in exchange for a $1b cut each year that is going to get smaller and eventually move to a direct competitor - making it a double loss IMO.
 
adamsapple said:
But why separate the division from its parent company which created/funds it ? That's such an arbitrary distinction.

You don't think Sony, as a company, funnels money into Playstation from other divisions or vice versa ?
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Some folks think PlayStation was this small garage project that grew organically. Never mind all that Trinitron, Walkman, Columbia Pictures/Music money that was used to over power Sega and damn near killed Nintendo.
 
It's funny how Sony is able to use all their advantages (userbase, studios, etc) to get ahead but MS can't use their advantages (money).

adamsapple said:
But why separate the division from its parent company which created/funds it ? That's such an arbitrary distinction.

You don't think Sony, as a company, funnels money into Playstation from other divisions or vice versa ?

Like you said, it's a business and MS are making a business deal with this Activision acquisition as any business with that kind of capital would.
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Ozriel said:
Unlikely that a developer owned by Microsoft and developing games for a global Audience can go out of business.
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Really, because last time I checked Shenmue 1 and 2 ended up with Xbox only for Shenmue 3 needing to be endorsed by PlayStation to get crowd funded, and that was a no. 1 tier Sega IP. If Microsoft couldn't justify funding more Japan made Shenmue when Xbox was much bigger in Japan and serving a world wide market, Why would buying the whole company be any different?
Ozriel said:
Regulators know the difference between an OS and a storefront.
Competition in the gaming PC space is between Microsoft Store, EGS and Steam. And MS first party titles show up on Steam day one.
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And yet, the CMA were the ones to cite the +95% OS market share of Windows for PC gaming in the Cloud SLC, so I wouldn't be so sure they would make that differentiation.
 
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Give the culture war bullshit a rest lol

Everything being looked at is within the realm of anti-trust, including the US looking into exclusivity deals. The amount of an industry someone controls is looked at in those cases and a company using the leverage they have as a monopoly or "near monopoly" to continue to get exclusive deals can actually be deemed an anti-trust violation.

Now does that mean what Sony is doing is an anti-trust violation? I don't personally think so; but these are the things anti-trust orgs and governments are SUPPOSED to look at. In the entire gaming segment Sony is far from a monopoly or near monopoly, in the console gaming market they aren't either.. but if you do look at the 2 companies that have differentiated themselves as more direct competitors, Sony and Microsoft, Sony is a near monopoly. They are absolutely twisting the knife into Microsoft with those deals, it's plainly obvious.. they are going hard from the start of a generation with this stuff and as a Playstation gamer it isn't benefiting me.

Yes it's "just business" but you could also say "it's just anti-trust regulation."

I don't personally care very much, I am not lobbying my Senator to go after Sony, but I also.. again.. don't personally care that much.. and this absolutely has nothing to do with the petty culture war BS that infects this forum lol

In THIS INDUSTRY MS is the smaller player, it's just how these things work. They have much less of the market than Sony, they have less leverage over 3rd parties, etc. That's why they might be "protected" vs. Sony, and that's completely normal. MS also controls a big chunk of cloud compute.. so in THAT aspect of gaming, Sony might be "protected" in some ways.. also normal. It's not as simple as "MS has more market cap" and it's not as simple as "Sony is bigger in gaming"... it's anti-trust law, it's.. complicated lol
 
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adamsapple said:
But why separate the division from its parent company which created/funds it ? That's such an arbitrary distinction.

You don't think Sony, as a company, funnels money into Playstation from other divisions or vice versa ?

Like you said, it's a business and MS are making a business deal with this Activision acquisition as any business with that kind of capital would.
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You've got to remember that when a lot of the warriors use the term "business" they are saying that everyone should play along with the status quo that benefits their preferred platform of choice. Any moves in a different direction that said chosen platform does not have a leg up in, well that's just not good "business". :messenger_tears_of_joy:

Sony is going to Sony and MS is going to MS, they have different strengths and different weaknesses, both will push things to the limit to see how far they can bend situations to their advantage within the given rules. Both are large enough in certain markets where their actions in those markets will be watched carefully. It is what it is.

The last few years seems to be the first time in 20yrs where MS has really seemed to even acknowledge the Xbox division and tried to bolster the position there. I agree with @ GHG GHG that they should have taken it more seriously 20 years ago. They should have had one of the largest and most well funded first-party efforts in the industry, the fact that they don't shows that they didn't put their money where it was needed until now.
 
C2brixx said:
Some folks think PlayStation was this small garage project that grew organically. Never mind all that Trinitron, Walkman, Columbia Pictures/Music money that was used to over power Sega and damn near killed Nintendo.
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and MS was trying to save Nintendo and nobody talks about that.

Xbox was made with scraps found in a landfill. Phil himself was asking door to door for donations and even doing unholy things to keep Xbox afloat
 
adamsapple said:
But why separate the division from its parent company which created/funds it ? That's such an arbitrary distinction.

You don't think Sony, as a company, funnels money into Playstation from other divisions or vice versa ?

Like you said, it's a business and MS are making a business deal with this Activision acquisition as any business with that kind of capital would.
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We are literally talking about the 2nd largest business in the world. A position which was gained by almost half a century of predatory and monopolistic practices.

This very same company who now is saying they need to make acquisitions that are larger than their competitors entire market caps in order to "compete" in the gaming industry. At least they are now simply reverting to what they do and know best, no more charades.

And no, not all businesses with that kind of capital need to make the biggest acquisition in their entire company's history just to "compete" in an industry that they've already been present in for 20+ years. You'd think they could have figured a few things out in that time, but alas, this is what happens when you have an entertainment business division in the middle of a larger entity that his zero synergy with it.
 
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GHG said:
We are literally talking about the 2nd largest business in the world. A position gained by almost half a century of predatory and monopolistic practices. This very same company who is saying they need to make acquisitions that are larger than their competitors entire market cap in order to "compete" in the gaming industry.

And no, not all businesses with that kind of capital need to make the biggest acquisition in their entire company's history just to "compete" in an industry that they've already been present in for 20+ years. You'd think they could have figured a few things out in that time, but alas, this is what happens when you have an entertainment business division in the middle of a larger entity that his zero synergy with it.
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Need to and want to are completely different things. As much as I hate the complete corporate consolidation happening in our world right now, right next to you, it is an unfortunate reality and the last couple of years have only expedited it.

At the very least I'd much rather have an MS (or Sony if they had the capital) to acquire Activision than a Meta or Amazon.
 
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Why should Microsoft create their own shit when they could just wait for someone else to create something big like cod or elder scrolls and then just buy it? Sony would do the same if they were a trillion dollar company. Only issue I have with it is the fact that Microsoft are the only ones capable of doing this and that becomes unfair to the other competitors. Competition is thrown out the window at that point because neither competitor has anywhere near that spending power. If sony were apple and Nintendo were Google, then it would be competition!
 
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POKEYCLYDE said:
If the percentage of people who switched from Playstation to Xbox in case of an exclusivity strategy was higher, the math could make sense. If 50% of PS CoD players jumped over to Xbox, and they all joined the $10 tier of Gamepass, the benefit of making CoD exclusive would outweigh the cost of such. If 50% joined Xbox, bought CoD and 1 other 1st party title or even a 3rd party title, it would be a viable strategy to make CoD exclusive.
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What's the 50% based on though? Seems completely arbitrary to me that you've made up this benefit threshold where you use a different percentage increase in price for those switching.

You're still relying on something 'unrelated' to recoup the loss too, namely the margins of some other 1st party or 3rd party games they might buy in addition. Why can't this be a subscription service that can increase in price which would considerably affect the static LTV used in the incentives analysis?

POKEYCLYDE said:
The price would increase for everyone, but the cost/benefit analysis would only take into account new customer gains.
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Your cost/benefit analysis is flawed though and I'm not sure why you would do it that way. it's irrational to look at different price increases for consumers who move from a downstream rival vs other consumers. It really doesn't make sense in the context of the subscription service and foreclosure incentive.

POKEYCLYDE said:
The incentive to do X has to rely on the results of X. (This being the most important part that you keep over looking)
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It doesn't. You only need to look at Facebook/Giphy for an example of this. The incentive to do X (which is to foreclose) can rely on any number of things. The 'results' have external variables that are based on your strategy. There is no specific technique to asses the ability or incentive to foreclose. Least of all an out of context analysis which relies on differing prices depending on if you came from a downstream rival. We have vertical arithmetic or vguppi but those are also limited and dropped by the CMA for Facebook/Giphy.

The point being made is that the variables in the incentive analysis can be changed over the LTV time range to increase the merging parties ability to foreclose. We were discussing incentives that relied on a set LTV of current xbox users and how inaccurate that would be if subscription price increased by $1.45 for gamepass since they are artificially low. It doesn't help that both console and MGS margins are low too and COD margins high. foreclosure is likely to cause significant downstream diversion with only limited upstream dilution.
 
PaintTinJr said:
Really, because last time I checked Shenmue 1 and 2 ended up with Xbox only for Shenmue 3 needing to be endorsed by PlayStation to get crowd funded, and that was a no. 1 tier Sega IP. If Microsoft couldn't justify funding more Japan made Shenmue when Xbox was much bigger in Japan and serving a world wide market, Why would buying the whole company be any different?
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There's this thing called Gamepass that needs content.
Not sure why you're bringing up tales from 2002 as a rebuttal.
 
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