Former FTC Chair: "Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision has been followed by significant price hikes and layoffs, harming both gamers and developers"

Topher said:
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Poor thing, so attached to his console that can't live without console war ahahaha
 
So many idiots and shills were warned and yet they didn't listen. They were going after Lina Khan and saying she and the FTC didn't know what they were talking about. Books will be written about how a trillion dollar corporation was able to finesse an army of morons and fanboy shills in the gaming media into believing that they were somehow working for the greater interest of consumers and not for their own personal profit. They really made people believe they were spending $75 billion on Activision for the love of gaming and good vibes. This is some insane levels of social engineering that Phil and Co. pulled off on the gaming media and their dumbass fanbase.
 
Neat said:
Humans run corporations. Humans run government. Humans are good bad, honest, corrupt, and everything in between. Humans in govt are not inherently more honest than humans in business.

Be skeptical of all.
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To an extent, but a dangerous equivocation. It's important to understand the underlying motives of people and the interests they serve. In this case, it's a corporate and shareholder interest vs a public servant who (most likely) genuinely believes they are protecting people from an unfair business deal. You can't say all else is equal when this distinction exists.
 
Tobimacoss said:
How were gamers harmed in all this? By not getting Day 1 games for cheap price point?

Were they emotionally or physically harmed?
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If the GP sub price increase, and removing day 1 access from lower tiers, comes from not getting the result they wanted from the merger, then gamers were harmed through dealing with a higher cost.

If it's all unrelated and comes from other changes in the industry then all we can complain about is that the whole hobby isn't sustainable I guess. Plus we can complain that we didn't get the assumed increased games output. Currently there has been a bigger increase in games from the Bethesda merger and even now from Ubisoft Classics being added than from the ABK acquisition.
 
What am I missing here?

They increased price of gamepass.

COD would have sold at retail price otherwise.

Gamepass is expensive but feel free to buy game outright, like how it was going to be without Acti Blizz purchase.
 
FIREKNIGHT2029 said:
They were going after Lina Khan and saying she and the FTC didn't know what they were talking about.
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Well tbh, they didn't. They lost, and didn't even make the best arguments in so doing.

Personally, I'm glad they failed, and I was glad that the acquisition went through. Because I knew all of this was going to happen. The numbers of what Microsoft was trying to do just didn't add up, and the sooner and harder they failed at trying to subsume the core games medium and flip the economics of it upside down, the better.

Topher said:
I bet MS wants more people buying and less subscriptions because they know that will bring in more money. Really they should have never put COD on Game Pass. Bobby Kotick was right.
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I was going to say this in another thread, but I think them walking away from Gamepass and subscriptions is them starting the walk out of gaming practically altogether.

SlimySnake said:
They should learn from trump. thats how you get shit done. fucking making nvidia and amd give the u.s government 15% of all their china sales. then he bought a 15% stake in intel.
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That's actually the worst thing I think Trump has done fiscally other than tariffs. No branch of government should not be buying up shares of private corporations and exerting control therein. You're on the road to being indistinguishable from the Chinese if that becomes a trend, and it doesn't work from any perspective in the long run.
 
Maybe the FTC should have put forward a sensible, competent case instead of disingenuously carving out Sony and MS into their own market and whining about Christmas skins.
 
Microsoft misled the FTC when they presented an agreement with Nintendo for Call of Duty to get released on Nintendo consoles during the trial, an agreement we now know Microsoft never intended to honor.
 
This is stupid, from the FTC's standpoint, nothing monopolistic has happened. In fact, quite the opposite with MS going third party and losing even more market share.

The case was only about the prospects of creating a monopoly, of which it did not, but possibly might end up having enabled a duopoly in Nintendo and Sony.
 
I think Game Pass would have rose in price whatever the outcome of the merger. It's just a subscription service with the usual methods of trapping people in it and then rising the prices. If people are dumb enough to waste their money in such services, it makes sense that Microsoft (and all other companies) try to take advantage of this.

I don't think that what the FTC was fearing really happened here, but they are using the Game Pass price rising to create a "We were right" moment, but this is largely a stretch.

Xbox is going to die anyway from becoming totally irrelevant. Will they tell us "They were right" when this happens ?
 
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cireza said:
I think Game Pass would have rose in price whatever the outcome of the merger. It's just a subscription service with the usual methods of trapping people in it and then rising the prices. If people are dumb enough to waste their money in such services, it makes sense that Microsoft (and all other companies) try to take advantage of this.

I don't think that what the FTC was fearing really happened here, but they are using the Game Pass price rising to create a "We were right" moment, but this is largely a stretch.

Xbox is going to die anyway from becoming totally irrelevant. Will they tell us "They were right" when this happens ?
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Microsoft lied to the FTC, they argued that CoD would reach more people under their acquisition, by presenting a fake agreement with Nintendo of CoD ports on Nintendo consoles to the court. The truth is that the same platforms that got CoD before the aquisition are the same platforms that get CoD today. Thus they were presenting false testimony to the court.
 
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Turns out people were correctly criticising the merger after all and it wasn't just console wars...

i'm sure that thread back when it was happening probably has gold to be mined, it was always a terrible thing that pubs were trying to buy up the entire market, That was never going to be a good thing.
 
rm082e said:
You don't pay a premium to buy a large business, then leave it running as is. You buy it, you get rid of 10-20% of the staff, freeze raises, eliminate bonuses, and raise prices to their customers. This is what large acquisitions are all about. They didn't buy some small start-up.
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This guy businesses
 
Remember people like Patcher talking about the British regulator like they were Al-Qaeda, or something, for delaying the purchase? They all knew this would be bad for consumers and bad for the industry but were just very greedy for their pay day.
 
Loomy said:
We all knew they were lying back then. Brad Smith and all the other paid and unpaid mouth pieces knew they were lying - at least the ones who aren't complete and absolute useless morons.

How's Modern Warfare doing on the Switch? Anyone able to Black Ops 7 on the Switch yet?

And fuck Ryan McCaffrey. Finally coming up for air now that Phil's cock is no longer down his throat...Fucking idiot.
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Ryan McCafferty looks like a fookin weasel.
 
I knew this would happen with MS at the time and i was never a supporter of Microsoft being in charge of so many studios, one of the worst things to happen in gaming in my opinion, and here we are, still waiting on the great games to be released.
 
Kind of interesting, because they arrived at the right conclusion but not in the way they expected.

The fear was the merger would give MS such a dominant position with GP that they could abuse that to jack the price.

In reality it seems more like the merger has not in fact delivered them a dominant position, and that they are raising the price from a position of weakness / as a result of having given up on achieving dominance with GP. Given they arrived at this position even with the merger, it seems likely they would arrived here just as well without the merger too.

If the merger had delivered the position of dominance feared, we probably still would have had the price rises eventually, but not until further down the line once they had maxxed out subscriber growth.
 
It wasn't a bad deal because it would make MS a monopoly and enable them to dominate everyone. It was a bad deal because it's bad for the industry for large swaths to get bought up by an incompetent owner with no managerial ability doomed to shatter the value of all the assets into nothing.
 
All you guys switching to digital and loving these subs are to blame.

"You will own nothing and be happy."

Whose happy? It was a pipe dream to believe that the continued erosion of ownership would be beneficial to anyone but those who control the rights of those products. How long before they charge a "maintenance fee" to manage your digital library?

I'm back to buying physical full time on console. I'm doing my part to fight back. Steam is digital because… no choice.
 
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FIREKNIGHT2029 said:
So many idiots and shills were warned and yet they didn't listen. They were going after Lina Khan and saying she and the FTC didn't know what they were talking about. Books will be written about how a trillion dollar corporation was able to finesse an army of morons and fanboy shills in the gaming media into believing that they were somehow working for the greater interest of consumers and not for their own personal profit. They really made people believe they were spending $75 billion on Activision for the love of gaming and good vibes. This is some insane levels of social engineering that Phil and Co. pulled off on the gaming media and their dumbass fanbase.
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The FTC didn't know what they were talking about though. Anyone here really going to argue that MS are raising prices because they are in such a dominant position in gaming? That Sony and Nintendo can't compete? That MS are making all the Activision games exclusive to Xbox, forcing people to their console? That cloud computing is a massively important market and MS are dominating it?
 
Ron Orbital said:
To an extent, but a dangerous equivocation. It's important to understand the underlying motives of people and the interests they serve. In this case, it's a corporate and shareholder interest vs a public servant who (most likely) genuinely believes they are protecting people from an unfair business deal. You can't say all else is equal when this distinction exists.
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I agree that incentives matter. But I'm not going to give someone a pass just because they believe they are doing good. They could still be wrong.

All is equal in that facts, logic, current law are what matters, not who is representing one side of an argument.
 
calico said:
Kind of interesting, because they arrived at the right conclusion but not in the way they expected.

The fear was the merger would give MS such a dominant position with GP that they could abuse that to jack the price.

In reality it seems more like the merger has not in fact delivered them a dominant position, and that they are raising the price from a position of weakness / as a result of having given up on achieving dominance with GP. Given they arrived at this position even with the merger, it seems likely they would arrived here just as well without the merger too.

If the merger had delivered the position of dominance feared, we probably still would have had the price rises eventually, but not until further down the line once they had maxxed out subscriber growth.
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I don't think the price would have been jacked up without the merger but yeah clearly, this isn't due to any "dominant" position though. The Bloomberg report stating massive losses from COD is probably the most obvious reason. Either way, it goes back to what you said: right conclusion, not how expected.
 
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I used to love it when clowns on here used to defend MS a company famous for pure greed, monopolist practises and crying to the authorities about other companies. So the AB deal was good for the industry? Staff fired, studios closed and prices increased. The consumer sure is better off.
I'm sure the diehards are loving paying the extra money. It's deserved
 
GHG said:
It's related to another topic that he's been covering of late:

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The current circular AI investment bullshit, that MS is also heavily involved in, is all kinds of ridiculous and in saner times Gov would be investigating that.

FTC was absolutely right to bring the case to block the merger and at the same time absolutely inept at prosecuting that case.
 
ZehDon said:
No, Khan was not right.

Microsoft didn't establish a dominant platform.
Microsoft didn't hold the titles as exclusives to muscle out competitors.
Microsoft didn't abuse a monopolistic position that stemmed from the acquisition.
Microsoft doesn't have a dominant platform, it's not a monopoly, and it couldn't muscle out anyone - it's competitors punched it in the throat and stole its lunch money.

The price hikes and lay offs are a result of multiple factors. The natural effects of consolidating businesses of that size means lay offs are inevitable, but Microsoft also added AI on top, resulting in massive waves of layoffs as it seeks to, effectively, replace its human workers with digital agents. The price hikes are a result of Microsoft failing to meet its targets with services like Game Pass, and the resulting pivots away from trying to outspend its competitors. But, there's also inflation, tariffs, and general economic uncertainly stemming from an American trade war that makes no financial sense to anyone, giving every platform holder carte blanche to raise their prices to whatever the fuck they feel like.

The regulators predicted the end of the gaming industry, the collapse of Sony, and a complete monopoly held by Microsoft. Today, we're talking about if Xbox is even going to exist in five years.
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And there it is. 100% correct
 
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