Microsoft's $69 Billion Activision Deal Could Harm UK Gamers, Watchdog Finds (bloomberg.com) 37
Microsoft's $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard will harm competition in the UK gaming market, Britain's antitrust watchdog provisionally warned, saying it could force the selloff of the blockbuster Call of Duty franchise. From a report: The Competition and Markets Authority said it took an initial view that the deal could result in a substantial lessening in competition, higher prices, fewer choices or less innovation for UK gamers, according to a statement published Wednesday. Microsoft first announced the Activision deal last year, looking to add games like Call of Duty to a business that already includes the Xbox console, the Halo franchise and Minecraft world-building software.
But the tie-up has fallen foul of global regulators who fear that Microsoft could make it harder for rival platforms to get unfettered access to Activision's most popular titles. The British agency has suggested a number of structural remedies that include the divestiture of the business associated with Call of Duty, the Activision part of the business or blocking the merger altogether. The CMA also said it would consider a behavioral remedies that would promise rivals can access to Call of Duty, although it flagged concerns about its ability to manage these.
But the tie-up has fallen foul of global regulators who fear that Microsoft could make it harder for rival platforms to get unfettered access to Activision's most popular titles. The British agency has suggested a number of structural remedies that include the divestiture of the business associated with Call of Duty, the Activision part of the business or blocking the merger altogether. The CMA also said it would consider a behavioral remedies that would promise rivals can access to Call of Duty, although it flagged concerns about its ability to manage these.
Then why allow Sony to harm gamers? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Then why allow Sony to harm gamer (Score:3)
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Re:Then why allow Sony to harm gamer (Score:4, Interesting)
. I would bet you the ZeniMax purchase by MS acquired more developers in a single purchase than Sony did over a decade.
I'll take you on that bet. Sony aquired 13 game studios in the last decade. The Zenimax deal got Microsoft 8 studios.
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I think from a consumer perspective the IP is actually the more important part of the equation. While I don't play Call of Duty I think its pretty hard to argue that in North America & Europe its probably the most important IP in gaming and if Microsoft were to make it an Xbox exclusive it would certainly harm console & streaming competition.
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Generally though with the consolidation across Microsoft, Sony and Embracer there are concerns that should also be considered for employees who will have few
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It would also harm Microsoft's acquisition.
Xbox is THIRD on Call of Duty's platform list. First is PlayStation, then comes PC. To make Call of Duty Xbox exclusi
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I could not find the size of Lasengle nor Haven Studios but I doubt they are 600+
Microsoft's acquisition of Zenimax alone: 2300
Care to bet now?
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Last year there was a total of 5 game titles from an MS owned studio that were only available on PC and Xbox for the first six months after release. In that same year 25 game titles from Sony owned studios were and to this day still are Playstation exclusive.
But that is cherry picking numbers. MS bought Zenimax which includes Bethesda and id software. The proposed purchase of Activision includes large amounts of games and IP greater than all of Sony's acquisitions in the last decade. At best you are saying is that MS is terrible at releasing games than Sony and thus MS needs to buy other studios.
I don't have PC only game numbers for a fair comparison, but a number of Zenimax titles appeared on Steam last year after MS acquired them which were not on steam before. I'm only aware of one (1)Sony owned title released on Steam, the naughty dog studios re-release The last of us, a year after being playstation exclusive. Uncharted was released the year prior on PC as well as playstation.
You seem intent on exclusivity as the only aspect to consider. It is not. Pricing, product variability are other aspects.
MS expects to profit from their games only, so pushes them far and wide to avoid excluding any potential customers due to what platform they use.
And what do you think MS will do now that they
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Yeah, this does seem a bit nonsensical, it's the higher prices claim that got me especially.
Microsoft's first party titles have for years been at least £5 cheaper, sometimes as much as £15 in the UK than other publishers like Activision and Sony. By definition, allowing the status quo to maintain where CoD goes up by £5 every year then not letting the deal go ahead will result in higher prices because, well, that's exactly what's been happening over the last decade.
We've
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So tell me again how giving Microsoft a bigger share of the market will increase prices when they're the fairest priced major publisher in the console world?
But your assessment is that of old MS that did not have a large share of the market with the new MS that will have a substantial share. In other words, MS had to compete on pricing when they were a smaller player. And that is just pricing. The other thing that could be harmed are the products. As far as I know Doom Eternal does not have a 6v6 multiplayer deathmatch mode. Well that competes with CoD so Id under the direction of MS will never develop one now. While Overwatch coexists right now with CoD in som
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and have already stated they'd bring Activisions games like CoD to Game Pass which already means reduce the cost to access from the current status quo.
Why are you talking about cost? This is about price: What MS will charge consumers going forward regardless if they have reduced their cost with a merger.
This is just nonsensical rambling. I guarantee a decision to put multiplayer in Doom or not has exactly zero relevance to the fact CoD has multiplayer.
And how would you guarantee that? Doom has multiplayer now; it does not have 6v6 teams that CoD has. To develop that would cost money which MS would gladly charge more. With CoD and Doom under one ecosystem, is it less more likely that a consumer will pay for both a CoD battle pass and a Doom battle pass if they have the same game mode?
That's a bit like saying CoD will cease to have multiplayer because World of Warcraft already has multiplayer subscribers.
Except those two are
Really? (Score:3)
substantial lessening in competition, higher prices, fewer choices or less innovation for UK gamers
Let's look at those, in order:
substantial lessening in competition
What's the market that will allegedly be "less competitive" here? Are there going to be fewer shooters on the market as a result of this? Fewer consoles?
higher prices
This doesn't pass the smell test in a world where every new game on every platform from every publisher has had the same price (whatever the current "new title" price of the time was) for, what, at least thirty years at this point? Forty?
fewer choices
Fewer choices of what? Are there going to be fewer shooters, fewer consoles, fewer MMOs?
less innovation
Now they're just taking the piss. This is a brand that slaps a new coat of paint on the same properties and rereleases them every year, what "innovation" is going on here in the first place?
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Fewer choices of what? Are there going to be fewer shooters, fewer consoles, fewer MMOs?
This doesn't pass the smell test in a world where every new game on every platform from every publisher has had the same price (whatever the current "new title" price of the time was) for, what, at least thirty years at this point? Forty?
The issue being raised here is that with fewer AAA publishers like Activision there is more control of that pricing. Bethesda charges too much for a game? Buy a game from Activision then. . . . oh wait they are the same company now and have the same pricing.
Fewer choices of what? Are there going to be fewer shooters, fewer consoles, fewer MMOs?
Fewer choice of everything. That is the whole point.
Now they're just taking the piss. This is a brand that slaps a new coat of paint on the same properties and rereleases them every year, what "innovation" is going on here in the first place?
You do understand that when Bethesda's Doom had to compete against Activision's Call of Duty they had to come o
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You do understand that when Bethesda's Doom had to compete against Activision's Call of Duty they had to come out with new features? That is just one example. Now those two no longer have to compete, there will be even less innovation.
Oh, come on. There is no innovation from Activision - that hasn't been their raison d'etre for decades; they pump out reheated swill and the kids and normies lap it up. They're just EA with fewer sports licenses.
Call of Duty: Purple Member 7 and Doom Doublejump aren't in direct competition any more than ANY two games are. Doom didn't steal players away from CoD as they're only broadly in the same category ("FPS with multiplayer") as each other. To say that Doom 2016 only gained features compared to prior Do
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Oh, come on. There is no innovation from Activision - that hasn't been their raison d'etre for decades; they pump out reheated swill and the kids and normies lap it up. They're just EA with fewer sports licenses.
So your point is that since Activision does not innovate at all, MS should be allowed to reduce innovation further by reducing the number of AAA publishers? Is that your point?
Call of Duty: Purple Member 7 and Doom Doublejump aren't in direct competition any more than ANY two games are. Doom didn't steal players away from CoD as they're only broadly in the same category ("FPS with multiplayer") as each other. To say that Doom 2016 only gained features compared to prior Doom games because CoD exists is laughable. You think without CoD they'd just have remade Doom 3 and called it a day?
In the world I live in, people have limits on time and money. A player who wants to play a FPS may have to choose whether they want to spend their time and money on one game or another. I think that if then next CoD or Doom is terrible, players will buy the competitor's product. That won't be much of a choice if they are the same comp
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So your point is that since Activision does not innovate at all, MS should be allowed to reduce innovation further by reducing the number of AAA publishers? Is that your point?
My point was the "less innovation" argument is spurious in this case.
In the world I live in, people have limits on time and money. A player who wants to play a FPS may have to choose whether they want to spend their time and money on one game or another. I think that if then next CoD or Doom is terrible, players will buy the competitor's product. That won't be much of a choice if they are the same company.
You're not arguing my point; these games are not interchangable simply because you slap the "FPS" label on them. The CoD series has a diehard fanbase that play online competitively and often play little else. Doom's strength is its single-player campaign and the multiplayer is not nearly as popular as CoD. It's milk vs Coke, not Coke vs Pepsi. Whether they're published by one company or two is not the distinguisher here, and neither is whe
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You're not arguing my point; these games are not interchangable simply because you slap the "FPS" label on them. The CoD series has a diehard fanbase that play online competitively and often play little else. Doom's strength is its single-player campaign and the multiplayer is not nearly as popular as CoD. It's milk vs Coke, not Coke vs Pepsi. Whether they're published by one company or two is not the distinguisher here, and neither is whether they're considered good or bad.
Are you asserting that if the next CoD is terrible, no CoD player will ever play another FPS again? Or are they more likely to play another FPS like Doom than a Metroidvania style game? Think about that for a second. Also you seem to ignore the problem that if MS owns both id software and Activision, id software will NEVER make a military style FPS competitor to Call of Duty now.
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The issue being raised here is that with fewer AAA publishers like Activision there is more control of that pricing. Bethesda charges too much for a game? Buy a game from Activision then. . . . oh wait they are the same company now and have the same pricing.
My point is that this is fictional, it just plain doesn't happen. You can't even go to a different console to get different prices. New games all cost the same, regardless of platform, regardless of studio, regardless of publisher, and have for almost as long as video games have been a thing at all. Everyone moves in lockstep, no one competes on price, so "there will be less price pressure" is provably false.
Fewer choice of everything. That is the whole point.
[citation needed]. I gave "fewer shooters" and "fewer consoles" and "fewer MMOs" as examples, so
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My point is that this is fictional, it just plain doesn't happen. You can't even go to a different console to get different prices. New games all cost the same, regardless of platform, regardless of studio, regardless of publisher, and have for almost as long as video games have been a thing at all. Everyone moves in lockstep, no one competes on price, so "there will be less price pressure" is provably false.
It may not happen with every developer and game but it happens. For example, Cyber Punk 2077 had a disastrous launch especially on consoles as the game was poorly optimized for them. Thus the game prices on Xbox and PS5 dropped but not the price on PC where the game performed better if the consumer had a better GPU. And that says nothing about more independent games or the yearly sales on Steam.
[citation needed]. I gave "fewer shooters" and "fewer consoles" and "fewer MMOs" as examples, so I assume "everything" would include those. Is EA going to stop making Battlefield sequels now or something? Are MMO timesinks other than WOW going to disappear? Nintendo going to stop making consoles? Oh, I know, maybe as a result of this merger Bethesda won't release an Elder Scrolls sequel for over a decade or something, and will just rerelease Skyrim over and over again, right? :rolleyes:
Yes. That is the whole point. The point is not that EA which is a current competitor to Activision will stop relea
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The point is not that EA which is a current competitor to Activision will stop releasing Battlefield. The point is that Bethesda which is a part of MS will never release a competitor to Call of Duty.
Do you have evidence besthesda was planning such a title? If so please present it.
Almost all of your responses on this article have been hypotheticals. Mostly from the position of "it's great for sony to do this but how dare microsoft". Chill dude, microsoft aren't the greatest of companies but neither is sony. We can at least try to be consistent with them though.
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Almost all of your responses on this article have been hypotheticals.
The ENTIRE article is about hypotheticals as the MS purchase of Activision has not happened yet. And?
Mostly from the position of "it's great for sony to do this but how dare microsoft".
And when did I say that? In this thread I said you cannot compare Sony's purchases of small studios over a decade with MS buying one of the largest publishers. The scale of purchases are not remotely close.
Chill dude, microsoft aren't the greatest of companies but neither is sony. We can at least try to be consistent with them though.
I am being consistent. If it was the other way around and Sony was buying Activision, my points would be EXACTLY the same.
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Sony's exclusivity contracts are well known. To excuse their behaviour while condemning Microsoft's is hypocritical. Sony have actively stopped games coming to other platforms. Microsoft might, but have yet to do so. For example see minecraft.
From a "I want to play games" perspective, sony has been more cancerous.
Oh good! (Score:2)
Harm UK gamers, like in beat the tar out of them? I like this idea!
Sounds like Sony needs to innovate the FPS (Score:2)
So what if the game isn't available? Sony can invest in building a better FPS and competing using entrepreneurism rather than using politics to get economic gain. This is a good thing for gaming.
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maybe Sony should purchase the Battlefield franchise and actually return it to it's previous glory and truly compete with CoD again.
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Exactly. An innovation race is what this market needs.
Who Cares (Score:2)
I'm Truly a Nerd and this Truly Doesn't Matter
Yeah, no shit (Score:2)
Also, MS basically harms everybody whenever it acquires something and then "improves" it.