Activision CEO Kotick Says Sony 'Won't Return Our Phone Calls' (thegamer.com) 15
An anonymous reader shares a report: Things aren't looking great for the Microsoft-Activision merger. The EU has issued a statement of objections, the UK's CMA issued a provisional report finding the merger would stifle competition, and the FTC has outright sued to make sure the merger never happens in the US. It seems every major world regulator has a problem with Microsoft and Activision shacking up. It's at this point that most C-suite executives of a major corporation would start hedging their bets, but Sony has started screening Bobby's calls.
"It's funny, Sony's not on the phone to us," said Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick. "In fact, they're not returning our phone calls." In an interview with Fox Business, Kotick talked about the embattled merger and how normally he'd be on the phone with Sony executives talking about new business ventures. That's all changed because of the Microsoft merger.
"It's funny, Sony's not on the phone to us," said Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick. "In fact, they're not returning our phone calls." In an interview with Fox Business, Kotick talked about the embattled merger and how normally he'd be on the phone with Sony executives talking about new business ventures. That's all changed because of the Microsoft merger.
Business and Feelings don't miss. (Score:3)
Large companies usually have the ability to encapsulate their business units, in a way other companies are both their biggest partner and their biggest competitor.
Think Apple and Microsoft with Office Products for Mac, or Apple with Samsung where Samsung Display Technology and some chips are sold to Apple, to make devices that compete with their own devices.
I do think Japans aging population is catching up to them. With Japanese Cars and Technology is starting to lag behind the rest of the world, where their neighbors like South Korea and China are chipping away at Japanese products which they use to excel in. American companies as well have been keeping par with the rest of the world as well.
Sony not working with Activation and Microsoft is only going to hurt their Play Station brand in the future, as it will cut down on the number of big titles available to their brand.
Re:Business and Feelings don't miss. (Score:5, Interesting)
Alternatively, and this might be a simpler explanation, Sony doesn't want to talk to Activision or Microsoft while they are in trouble for doing something that Sony thinks is bad for Sony.
Who benefits from Sony and Activision talking now? Mostly Microsoft, because they can pretend they're not going to shut Sony out as fast as they can get away with. Sony's safer bet is to wait until this merger gets shut down by all those regulators.
Re: (Score:2)
Alternatively, and this might be a simpler explanation, Sony doesn't want to talk to Activision or Microsoft while they are in trouble for doing something that Sony thinks is bad for Sony.
As it speculates in the article, maybe Sony does not want to talk to Kotick. The article says Sony is not speaking with Kotick. It does not say that Sony is not talking to anyone at Activision. Personally I believe that Kotick simply assumes no one at Sony is talking with Activision because he is all of Activision. No one else exists in his mind.
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Japan's auto industry is suffering not just from work-cultural malaise, but also from being #1. The tendency to rest on one's own laurels is typical and self-defeating. American car companies did this and found themselves unable to adapt as quickly as the Japanese to the changing regulatory landscape. But now there's enough people who won't buy anything but Japanese (and frankly, with good reason) that they are overconfident.
Sony doesn't want to make deals if they think that the merger won't go through, the
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Business and Feelings don't miss. (Score:5, Insightful)
> Large companies usually have the ability to
> encapsulate their business units, in a way other
> companies are both their biggest partner and their
> biggest competitor.
Yes, they do have that ability. But Microsoft in particular has a long history of declining to do so, or putting on airs of doing so, then showing their true colors and reneging on the deal later on. They even have a history of using their windows/office warchest for acquisitions that benefited them in no way whatsoever (even leaving free money on the table) other than to harm a competitor. You cite Office for the Mac. But they have a historical off-again, on-again, pattern with that very product. Over the years they have withheld or delayed features from the Mac version, sometimes priced it higher, and other times made sure that the doc files between platforms were incompatible. Another example would be Internet Explorer. You'll recall that there was about a decade there where IE was the default browser on the Mac. But in the second half of that decade, Microsoft stopped fixing bugs, ignored performance issues, and began withholding features from the Mac version; basically letting it stagnate into decrepitude versus the windows version. That is why Apple forked khtml and created Safari. Another example is Connectix VirtualPC. It was an Intel PC emulator for Macs back in their Motorola/IBM days before Fusion and Parallels. It's wasn't good enough for gaming, but adequate for many windows applications you'd find in the workplace. So the vast majority of VirtualPC purchases led to the sale of a windows license... free money for MS... and not an el cheapo OEM license, but a full retail purchase. And Microsoft has no use for an Intel emulator for PowerPC since they... you know... develop their OS for Intel and not PPC. But they bought VirtualPC anyway, giving up the sales of windows that came when Mac users bought it, solely to harm Apple.
But this article is about gaming. So let's look at games. It goes all the way back to Halo. Remember before the gates sank his fangs into Bungie? Bungie started out as a Mac developer, and wrote Halo to be cross-platform and run on both Apple's and Microsoft's OSs. And that wasn't vaporware. It was demoed, to great praise and anticipation, at Macworld. So what did Microsoft do? They bought Bungie, discontinued all of their old Mac-friendly franchises like Marathon, Myst, and Oni; and then stripped out all the cross-platform Halo code... that had already been written and was in the final optimization and clean phase, mind you... just so as to deny Mac users a AAA game title and ensuing franchise. Or, more recently, look to their acquisition of Bethesda. What exactly happened to the Playstation version of Starfield after the acquisition again?
Yeah. Microsoft has the ability to encapsulate these business units. But even where they've appeared to have done so, the encapsulation hasn't lasted. And they have such a long and ignominious history of operating in bad faith and leaving other platforms, and those platforms' users, hanging; even where they lured them into complacency by starting out by seeming to play nice. So why should Kotick, or his puppeteers in Redmond, expect to be trusted now?
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Myst was never a Bungie franchise. The first couple of games were developed by Cyan. The first game was financed by SunSoft IIRC and published by Broderbund. Myst III was developed by Presto Studios and published by Ubi Soft, and Myst IV was both developed and published by Ubisoft. All the Myst games were released for Mac. Microsoft never got a hold of it.
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Well, that's my bad. I mixed up, when I typed, Myth [wikipedia.org] with that other very-similarly spelled and pronounced franchise. The one-word error hardly invalidates Microsoft's entire malevolent history though. And the Myth franchise was, indeed, killed in the wake of Microsoft's acquisition of Bungie; just like Marathon and One were.
Makes sense (Score:2)
I'm just kidding, this is
Simpler explanation (Score:2)
Dream all you want, but it's going through. (Score:2)
Despite all wish-fulfillment reporting to the contrary, this deal is going through. The regulatory bodies have already left large holes for Microsoft to drive through to obtain approval, and Nintendo's willingness to sign a 10-year deal to keep Call Of Duty on their platforms is the nail in the coffin of Sony's counterargument.
Is this deal bad for gamers? Yes. Is it monopolistic? No. Is it anti-competitive? Sort of, but not outrageously so.
If you want to drown your sorrows, buy Activision stock in the
Did Bobby not realize that it's him? (Score:1)
Bobby Kotick is a great CEO in terms of the horrible crap that CEO's do or support in order to keep making money. He's really good at that job. He's made some mistakes because no one is perfect. He has taken Activision from a big game developer and publisher to obviously one of the largest publisher and developers in the world. He bought up some development houses back in the day to grow even larger.
I sold a ton of Activision games back in the 99-02 time frame on all consoles and on PC when I worked at ye o