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Microsoft / Activision deal prevented to protect innovation and choice in cloud gaming

DeepEnigma

Gold Member
well it was bull shit reason for it not to get trashed cloud gaming is a fad now.
MS has only themselves to blame for the Power of the Cloud™ and pushing it in the forefront of reaching over 150m gamers via xCloud with this deal. 🤷‍♀️

Dude, our phones and web browsers have autocorrect, including for punctuation. At this point it has to be intentional.
Those pesky learning dictionaries.
 
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well it was bull shit reason for it to get trashed cloud gaming is a fad now.

It's not about now.

squidward GIF
 
She might want to try scrubbing that one from the internets. Tirades against the UK won't matter much once the circus ends. Tirades against the company that makes her company lots of money might matter a great deal.
That bitch is supposed to be a lawyer for Activision?

Was she learning her trade from Giulliani by any chance? Keeping an eye for a reaction press conference from the 4 seasons landscape entrance :messenger_sunglasses:
 

devilNprada

Member
She might want to try scrubbing that one from the internets. Tirades against the UK won't matter much once the circus ends. Tirades against the company that makes her company lots of money might matter a great deal.

Americans need to realise that what works in the US does not automatically work elsewhere. Insulting and threatening a country will never bode well when you want something from them. The shit meme culture does not work with public sectors in Europe.

Lulu Misery
Of course she's pissed, she stood to make A SHIT TON of money on this deal..
We would all throw a shit fit in her shoes...
Imagine missing the lottery by 1 number....
 

NickFire

Member
Of course she's pissed, she stood to make A SHIT TON of money on this deal..
We would all throw a shit fit in her shoes...
Imagine missing the lottery by 1 number....
I get that. I'd be pissed too. But if I found out the money wasn't coming in, I would definitely delete any evidence that might make me lose more money.
 

GHG

Member
Of course she's pissed, she stood to make A SHIT TON of money on this deal..
We would all throw a shit fit in her shoes...
Imagine missing the lottery by 1 number....

It's worse than missing the lottery by one number.

It's like being given all the fucking numbers and then selecting different ones for no reason other than your own arrogance.

The CMA clearly outlined all of their concerns and what needed to be addressed in order for the deal to pass. And instead of sitting down with the CMA to get absolute clarification on what needed to be done in order to move forward they were all too busy making memes, attacking the competition, weaponising the media/twitter/forums/etc and in general behaving like a bunch of jumped up frat boys. They all thought that as soon as the console concerns were out of the picture that they had it in the bag and failed to read the room.

So, ultimately, it is what it is.
 
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DenchDeckard

Moderated wildly
Well, cloud gaming is obviously a big deal and is going to take over within the next 10 years I guess.

Cya consoles.....

I feel like ive heard that before.
 
Literally no MS fan has said cloud gaming is the future. Even as an Xbox fan, gamepass is great but no one actually streams the games.

When you talk about shifting the argument, it's projection
You obviously weren't around for the Xbone launch with "the power of the cloud".. Some pushed it as some secret special sauce, waiting to be unlocked, along with extra cpu and memory. When the bone unleashed it's ultimate form.... That of course never happened it was spouted by fanboys for years though. Talk went away when the pspro and xb1x launched.
 

dotnotbot

Member
Yet Sony can go on studio spending sprees

Microsoft:
2018: Compulsion Games
2018: inXile Entertainment
2018: Ninja Theory
2018: Obsidian Entertainment
2018: Playground Games
2018: Undead Labs
2019: Double Fine Productions

2020: Zenimax & Bethesda - 10 studios included
2022: Attempt to buy Activision with 15 studios

Sony:
2019: Insomniac Games
2021: Housemarque
2021: Firesprite
2021: Bluepoint Games
2022: Haven Studios
2022: Bungie - independent, still multiplatform
2023: Firewalk
 
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Eotheod

Member
Edit: oh god this turned into a tldr woops. Essentially cloud gaming ain't happening because country infrastructure is shit house and you can't control that so it ain't moving needles.

Everyone is aware we are all armchair analysts right, and literally everything said so far is speculative and has much weight as the stupid twitter threads. Right? People aren't seriously believing what they are typing is a plausible scenario when there are actual specialists arguing on all sides that know their shit way more then we do. At least I hope the sane ones know we are just purely having speculative discussions.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy these breakdowns and commentary, it's what makes me come to GAF if not for the hilarious multi-faced turnabouts on all sides. Can definitely say some people have too thin of a moral compass that they literally spin the opposite way if the discussion isn't working out for their take. But at the end of the day we literally are people on an internet forum who probably all thought CoD wasn't actually that big of a deal.

Heck, I never thought cloud gaming was that significant of a market and still don't despite this decision. I personally, as I've said before, believe that market is deader then dead because it's reliance on country infrastructure to expand is what will stop it from doing just that. Standard console usage is far easier to sell then a cloud-based gaming service that relies on infrastructure that you have no control over, and is dependant on how much the country cares about said infrastructure.

Take Australia for example, as it's my home country and easiest to comment on. We have shit Internet infrastructure thanks to Liberals fucking with the NBN (National Broadband Network), and as such it's rollout was botched with poor performing services that can barely get to 100mbps. That's in built-up city coastal areas, go any further inland and you have a mishap of old technology such as ADSL or potentially 4G LTE if you are lucky. Starlink has helped slightly (we are third in the world for uptake), but nothing guaranteed.

S o with a country like Australia, you try to build up your cloud gaming inticements and the gamer userbase will laugh. It's impossible of a market to crack, and even if you get some it's barely enough to balance costs of developing titles and maintaining servers. I believe the CMA has put far too much fair in that market without realising the integral part to such a market; that infrastructure needs to be there and it currently is not and probably never will be.
 
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Nydius

Gold Member
Heck, I never thought cloud gaming was that significant of a market and still don't despite this decision. I personally, as I've said before, believe that market is deader then dead because it's reliance on country infrastructure to expand is what will stop it from doing just that.
It might be deader than dead now but that doesn't mean it always will be. As has been pointed out in the other thread with a link to an article on the topic, the decision is about preventing issues from cropping up in the future. It's a proactive block now rather than a reactive anti-trust lawsuit later.

But I feel ya about infrastructure. I live in rural Oklahoma and I'm lucky to have one high speed internet provider, which works about 85% of the time. Far too many outages and slowdowns for cloud to be effective right now. But if they just look at the here and now and give Microsoft all these resources, it's not farfetched to see a future where Microsoft has absolute dominance in cloud, server side hosting, and software to leverage people to only their cloud services.

Besides, Microsoft themselves have been banging about how the cloud is their "#1 priority" for years now. They can't turn around and complain when that very priority turns out to be the reason their acquisitions are blocked.
 

Varteras

Member
Pretty sure it originated from the Financial Times which claimed the CMA was leaning towards approving the deal.

The same Financial Times that posted this little piece after the deal was blocked...

UK tech scene raises alarm over block to Microsoft-Activision deal

PAYWALL, of course.

Meanwhile...

 
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