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Judge rules for Microsoft in FTC fight over Activision
(www.polygon.com)
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this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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Sony acquired 4 companies while this whole thing was playing out...
A lot of fault lies with Jim "we believe in generations" Ryan being super aggressive with their backdoor deals keeping as many titles off Xbox as possible and fostering a toxic community of "Xbox has no games." Microsoft wasn't going to let all their Xbox investment go to waste.
Playstation has a very strong 1st party library and a huge install base carried over from their very successful PS4 run. They could have continued to dominate based on that alone, and instead chose to be hyper anti-competitive to kill competition which isn't unfamiliar territory for them. Lack of competition is what's really bad for consumers/gamers.
Not saying this acquisition is good. It's definitely not for me as a physical collector that believes in preservation. And this will only provoke the arms race of acquiring everyone on both sides. Probably the only winners in all this are indie devs which will have a lot of opportunities to make deals that help them make more creative, fun games than the AAA sequel-itis or remake/remaster-thons that have kept those games stagnant.
Microsoft's valuation is $2.4 trillion. Sony Group's is $110 billion.
Also Sony has never pulled the kind of shit MS has done with Windows, Internet Explorer, Office, Windows Media, I can go on. Neither are they acquiring Activision.
Monopolizing and destroying markets is in Microsoft's blood.
Saying Xbox has $2.4T at their disposal is ridiculous. They are such a small part of the overall company, they don't have the pull of, say, the Windows team or Office team. Otherwise, why would they wait a whole generation when they could have just made moves when they were being outsold 2:1 during the XBO days? People really don't understand how close Xbox got to going the way of Mixer or Windows Phone especially with Nadella made CEO right after that launch.
Playstation understood. And that's why they went with this scorched earth policy expecting MS to make the sensible decision to close up shop if they could get Xbox to repeat last gen. There's really no other reason for it unless you want to believe that somehow Xbox was going to not only catch up but overtake Playstation's massive install base, rich IP library, and crazy talented 1st party studios by just having a bunch of 3rd party games that are already on PS5. That's laughable.
Somehow Phil Spencer convinced Nadella to invest heavily in Xbox. But realistically, Xbox division is so inconsequential to Microsoft's success, the only way he would realistically do it is if the ROI was massive. Hence giant acquisitions and not a tit for tat bid wars against Sony on a game by game basis. Jim Ryan gambled big and he lost big. And we'll all suffer for it. Maybe not right away because Spencer doesn't strike me as the type of person Ryan is, but he'll leave one day and who knows who'll be next.
Me:
You:
Nice reading skills. How do you expect any discussion if you start by putting something in my mouth I never even remotely said?
Anyway.
Yes, Sony was bullish in the PS2 days, and their arrogance lead to fairly botched PS3 launch, which they needed years to recover from. But even the launch PS3 was a pretty good console on its own, the main problem were their dev tools.
MS had a hiccup with RROD, but otherwise the X360 was a massive hit and became the default console of that generation everywhere except Japan. Together with the Xbox interfaces for Windows, the ABXY Xbox buttons was a synonym for gaming.
MS had massive good will, all they needed is to just keep going.
But what does a company like MS do when they have momentum? They try to strangle the market. Always. They are incapable of working in any other way. And so instead of a proper gaming console, the xbox one was designed as machine for ads delivery, rental, DRM and spyware, with games only being an afterthought at best.
They also pulled that shit with Windows 10, but I'm not getting into that.
And they are doing it again with GamePass, their goal is for you to eventually have no other option then to rent games in perpetuity.
After they gobble up all the game studios and starve the market of everything else, after they gain enough dominance in yet another market, then you'll see the same disgusting dystopian corporation that has been pushing IE, Office, Windows and other cancer.
We've been there many many times.
And you'll see it again. Maybe not very soon, but in 10 years it'll be the same again.
You like Xbox? Let's have the Xbox brand fully separate from MS. Not be a subsidiary, a fully separate company with no relation to MS. Maybe then I'd give it 1% chance, but even then I wouldn't have them acquire fucking Activision. Heck, even if MS was the good guy here, Activision alone is a poisonous tumor that's been sucking the game industry dry. So how can this ever end well?
Anyway, I'm out. Got better things to do. Nice venting, tho.
If all you got from what I said is "You like Xbox" then I agree there's no point in continuing the discussion.
Good talk.
In the last couple of weeks, Microsoft has started having Microsoft Outlook default to open links in Microsoft Edge, despite the OS having a clear browser choice setting. They are override the user's explicit choice to grow power in a market they don't have (Web Browsers) using a market they have a near monopoly on(desktop email clients).