8
Microsoft wins FTC fight to buy Activision Blizzard
(www.theverge.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
8 points (100.0% liked)
Gaming
4 readers
1 users here now
founded 2 years ago
This is a loss for consumers. Massive consolidation, lack of competition. Get ready for them to pull games from PlayStation as soon as they are contractually allowed to. Get ready for everything to be on Game Pass and possibly not on Steam. Worst case: they disable purchasing some games on Game Pass so you always need a subscription.
I see a lot of people using argument #2 and it's really short-sighted to treat acquisition the same as exclusivity deals. However much I don't like either, acquisitions are clearly worse. If you had to pick one, why would you wouldn't just leave it as case-by-case exclusivity deals?
Say, SquareEnix and Atlus are fully capable of releasing games for other consoles even with all the exclusives they release for Playstation. And nothing stopped Microsoft from waving a wad of cash their way to change their minds.
There is absolutely no way such a large acquisition will be better for competition. The publishers become unable to make their own platform decisions, no matter what benefits there are. You are losing sight of the market as a whole and the independence of studios by focusing exclusively on who gets the #1 console crown.
Did we, though? Or maybe FTC could prevent further consolidation that will eventually result (and is already) in anticompetitive practices?
So now your choices will be: 1) pick the console that has more of your favorite games, or 2) now you have to buy BOTH consoles.
Fucking brilliant.
If you felt like you had to buy both consoles, that means the market got more competitive.
Competition means there's choice. Segregating titles that were once across multiple platforms (choice) into individual platforms (no choice) is anti-competitive.
I can't really break it down more than that and I thought this was obvious...
You do have choice. You have choice between group of exclusives A and group of exclusives B. It's better for competition but worse for the consumer. In order for it to be better for the consumer and competition, you'd need to eliminate the concept of exclusives entirely. And I'm all for that, but I don't know how to make that happen.
🤨
Well since exclusives will continue to exist, imagine if, hear me out here, third party titles remained cross platform and group B developed their own set of games at worst through infant studio acquisitions instead of, idk, acquiring the second largest third party publisher in the world (and thus all their studios).
Then that would be decidedly less competitive between the two consoles.
Yeah the poor trillion dollar company couldn't possibly compete with the billion dollar company by organically building an attractive portfolio. It's not like they did it before and only lost their position due to their own mishandling of studios and misunderstanding of the market.
They seemingly can't compete, so this is how they're making up for the ground that they lost, because right now the console market is not particularly competitive.
Microsoft creates demand for their system largely by buying up publishers and turning all their future games exclusive, that would otherwise have been multiplatform.
Sony and Nintendo create demand for their system largely by making great games in house, that otherwise never would have existed.
So yes you're right but one is much shittier than the other.
The games made in house are functionally identical to buying a studio that already existed. It's a game that can't be played anywhere else for arbitrary business reasons. I'd consider Sony's shittier, because I have to wait two years for a PC port, and Nintendo's shittier still because those games will never legally leave their platform.
The "pick one" mentality may come from the inherent freedom of Activision's owners. They don't see any further way for the publisher to grow, so they seek the next logical outcome for themselves: Acquisition. That's always going to come from a company large enough to be a major force in video games.
"Pick neither" is telling them they are not allowed to do anything with their company.
They could grow by making more games that sell well. More offshoot studios so they can have more parallel production.
If the ONLY way they can grow is to consolidate, then they are as big as they are going to get then. Tough titties. They have a minor duty to shareholders to turn a profit, not to grow at all costs. That's the problem with current capitalism and will lead to effective monopolies.
I'm opposed to this acquisition but let's be clear: Activision doesn't have a "minor duty to shareholders". They have a fiduciary duty to shareholders.
This can't be any worse than the pile of shit blizzard became, and Activision had always been.
If they are truly a pile of shit, then they should fail. MS just wants 2 things: 1) big name games to drive purchase of their console, 2) that sweeeeet MTX money from CoD and King.
Maybe MS will make starcraft 3. That's the dream.
Warcraft 4 would be nice, too.
Nah, I don't see things this way. Microsoft has been generous with its IP, in contrast to Sony, which keeps its games (and third party games, as was the case with Street Fighter 5) exclusive. Microsoft has licensed its biggest titles to the Switch and even the Playstation 4, and it has a history of cross-platform publishing that goes back decades. For instance, games in the Banjo-Kazooie series were released for the Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS. There's no reason to believe Microsoft will change that strategy, especially with the Xbox Series lagging so far behind its competitors in sales.
If Microsoft suddenly tightens the reins on its IP, consumers will spite them for it. After the Xbox One debacle, they know better than to force unwanted changes to the status quo of this industry.