Microsoft/Activision Blizzard Antitrust Hearings Reveal Internal Emails and Badly-Redacted Documents (venturebeat.com) 24
VentureBeat is enjoying "secrets that spilled out" in the Microsoft/Activision Blizzard antitrust hearings. "Whether the Federal Trade Commission wins its antitrust case or not, its attempt to stop Microsoft's $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard has revealed a trove of new data for everyone."
The FTC has argued in a federal court that the merger would harm competition in the game industry and be bad for consumers, as Microsoft could pull Activision Blizzard's games like Call of Duty away from the Sony PlayStation, despite Microsoft's stated intention of not doing so for at least 10 years. In this case, the FTC might not have had an obvious winning hand, as the industry has an odd situation. Microsoft has the highest value ($104 billion in cash alone, versus $13.4 billion for Sony) at $2.49 trillion as a company compared to $115 billion for Sony, and yet it is in third place behind Sony and Nintendo.
Hence, there's some significance to Microsoft's Xbox first-party head, Matt Booty, sending an ill-advised email in 2019 saying Microsoft "has the ability to spend Sony out of business." That was long before the deal was announced 17 months ago, but it could be used as a sign of intent. Microsoft said it never pursued this strategy. While competing fiercely is fine, using monopoly power to drive a rival out of business so you can raise prices later is a no-no...
Did the FTC prove its case? I can't say just yet. Microsoft makes a decent point in saying all the regulators of the world except the U.S. and the United Kingdom have approved the deal. But I hope to have more reasons to binge on popcorn.
In January Ars Technica noted Microsoft's contract set July 18th as the deadline for closing the deal — or else paying a $3 billion "breakup fee". The Verge spotted that some of Sony's documents were poorly redacted. While looking at the lines that were crossed out with black pens, they could see that The Last of Us Part 2 cost the company $220 million to make, with 200 people working on it, while Horizon Forbidden West cost $212 million to make, with 300 working on it for over five years. Both games made considerably more money... In the unSharpied documents, Sony also revealed that a million Call of Duty players spent 100% of their time playing Call of Duty in 2021. It also said that Call of Duty generated $800 million for PlayStation in 2021 alone in the U.S. and perhaps $1.5 billion globally. It also looks like Sony's exclusive marketing deal with Activision for Call of Duty will expire in late 2023. Sony went on to say half of PS5 owners also have a Nintendo Switch.
Microsoft also failed to redact some of its acquisition targets. Those were later marked up, but not before Axios noted that the list included Thunderful, Supergiant Games, Niantic, Playrix, Zynga, Bungie, Square Enix, Warner Bros., Sega, IO Interactive and Scopely... Among the secrets revealed among the companies Microsoft acquired: Microsoft bought Ninja Theory, maker of Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, for $117 million.
Thanks to Slashdot reader ole_timer for sharing the news.
Hence, there's some significance to Microsoft's Xbox first-party head, Matt Booty, sending an ill-advised email in 2019 saying Microsoft "has the ability to spend Sony out of business." That was long before the deal was announced 17 months ago, but it could be used as a sign of intent. Microsoft said it never pursued this strategy. While competing fiercely is fine, using monopoly power to drive a rival out of business so you can raise prices later is a no-no...
Did the FTC prove its case? I can't say just yet. Microsoft makes a decent point in saying all the regulators of the world except the U.S. and the United Kingdom have approved the deal. But I hope to have more reasons to binge on popcorn.
In January Ars Technica noted Microsoft's contract set July 18th as the deadline for closing the deal — or else paying a $3 billion "breakup fee". The Verge spotted that some of Sony's documents were poorly redacted. While looking at the lines that were crossed out with black pens, they could see that The Last of Us Part 2 cost the company $220 million to make, with 200 people working on it, while Horizon Forbidden West cost $212 million to make, with 300 working on it for over five years. Both games made considerably more money... In the unSharpied documents, Sony also revealed that a million Call of Duty players spent 100% of their time playing Call of Duty in 2021. It also said that Call of Duty generated $800 million for PlayStation in 2021 alone in the U.S. and perhaps $1.5 billion globally. It also looks like Sony's exclusive marketing deal with Activision for Call of Duty will expire in late 2023. Sony went on to say half of PS5 owners also have a Nintendo Switch.
Microsoft also failed to redact some of its acquisition targets. Those were later marked up, but not before Axios noted that the list included Thunderful, Supergiant Games, Niantic, Playrix, Zynga, Bungie, Square Enix, Warner Bros., Sega, IO Interactive and Scopely... Among the secrets revealed among the companies Microsoft acquired: Microsoft bought Ninja Theory, maker of Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, for $117 million.
Thanks to Slashdot reader ole_timer for sharing the news.
"has the ability to spend Sony out of business." (Score:3, Insightful)
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Also, Microsoft has repeatedly shown that it will not properly invest in its products despite their load of cash. Any reasonable person would expect them to buy Activision and then squander nearly every new opportunity involving it.
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Microsoft doubles or triples their money because they made XBOX and PC releases to be easy ports. The only things they have to worry about is the hardware variations, which, if done correctly, wont be a big deal.
You can argue if thats and advantage or not, but Nintendo never releases to PC, so the question really comes down to, what is the drive for sales? Is it the console, the game, or reoccurring o
Re: "has the ability to spend Sony out of business (Score:2)
âoe Microsoft said it never pursued this strategy.â
This is particularly rich in the middle of a lawsuit about a $68B acquisition which includes on of the worlds most popular franchises. If they arenâ(TM)t pursuing this strategy, then what is this acquisition about?
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No but using that cash to buy your company into an advantageous position against a rival is possibly a monopoly act. People seem to ignore acts matter when it comes to monopoly. In this case, suggesting to spend $3B to buy game developers is not necessarily problematic. Spending $7.5B to buy the a major developer/ distributor is problematic.
Dupe? (Score:3)
https://m.slashdot.org/story/4... [slashdot.org]
Didn't we discuss this already?
Arrrrgh! (Score:1)
Call it Sharpiegate II
Microsoft's position is of their own making (Score:5, Interesting)
Is it Nintendo and Sony's fault MS forced people to buy a useless camera pushing up the weaker performance hardware of Xbox One $100 over their competitor? MS put out an unattractive value proposition. Their focus was on TV and entertainment and being "input one", not games. Their Xbox One reveal was on midday television and aimed at adults, not gamers.
And then for the next 10 years they release good games I can count on one hand. They don't tap into the rich back catalog of studios they purchased such as Rare. They ignore franchises that had followings such as Viva Pinata and Banjo Kazooie.
Is it Nintendo and Sony's fault MS launched the Xbox Series S|X with no new first party games, no killer games, and made people wait 2 years for a weak entry in their main franchise Halo? Delay after delay but broken at launch? Is it Nintendo and Sony's fault that they learned nothing from the disaster that was the Halo Master Chief Collection?
Halo Infinite was the new flagship game for Xbox that they said would be the next 10 years of Halo, and it flopped, it has nobody's attention. They mismanage their own major game. Then they had another big release that was the first game which would not be made with the older hardware in mind, Redfall. It launched at a 4/10 rating.
Is it Nintendo and Sony's fault that MS, a house of talented developers and deep pockets, just kept shooting themselves in the foot and making mistake after mistake?
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But the idea was destroyed by a handful of elite gaming reviews. Had developers embraced Kinect and Kinect 2, the integration into the living room could have been really special.
My memory of the Kinect modules is that they were and are still terrible for being controllers. Macro movements are okay but it did not have the ability to reliably detect micro movements which would be required for a lot of games. That is reality and not the fault of reviews for pointing it out. As such why would developers spend resources incorporating it into their software?
"For Halo, wouldn’t it be great if a player could physically jump to make Master Chief jump? The size of their jump in real
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You comment would be on point if I could play a Sony game on the Xbox or PC. I can't. Saying it's Microsoft's own making is stupid given the absolute insane amount of money Sony gives to developers to lock games in as Playstation exclusives.
Even if you ignore the Xbox the one thing that has come out of this hearing is how the most hotly anticipated PC game of this year very nearly ended up a Playstation exclusive simply because of the mount of money Sony spends to "compete".
Sony games are on PC (Score:3)
You can! Horizon Zero Dawn, Returnal, Spiderman, Uncharted 1-4 + Lost Legacy, The Last of Us, Days Gone, Miles Morales, God of War...
They are all on PC!
You can also subscribe to a service that lets you stream PlayStation games from the cloud to your PC desktop!
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Saying it's Microsoft's own making is stupid given the absolute insane amount of money Sony gives to developers to lock games in as Playstation exclusives.
Can you quantify and list the "insane amount of money" that Sony gave? While Sony has paid some studios for 3rd party exclusives, most of the exclusives I am aware are from Sony's own studios and not 3rd parties.
Competition is good (Score:2)
What I have seen is that the gaming industry has really is skewed in terms of competition. It practically does not exist at a healthy level.
Things like "money hatting" to prevent released on competing platforms, open or thinly veiled threats (see that emails between execs, from each side), trying to completely wipe out competition (both Sony and Microsoft leaked emails against each other).
All those smiling executives out there turns out to be extremely cutthroat behind the scenes.
However, at the end of the
My favorite email (Score:3)
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Bethesda made this bed themselves when it came out they were in talks to move to a PS5 exclusive. If that weren't on the table Microsoft wouldn't have bought Zenimax in the first place.
If you show you're willing to sell out for some quick win dollars, don't be upset if someone with a bigger wallet comes in and then owns you in the most literal sense.
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Bethesda was becoming close to Sony because they had VR ambitions [psu.com], the path to forming a partnership seemed natural.
No. Sorry but Sony's VR ambitions are poor compared to those on PCVR. If they cared they'd have gotten close to Oculus Studios, or announced VR support for Starfield in any form, but they haven't.
"My strategy is more around our own first-party franchises, and investing in franchises that we own, and probably fewer exclusive deals for third-party content. I want to have strong third-party relations, but paying for many third-party exclusives isn’t our long term strategy," said Spencer.
This is the opposite strategy of other console makers Sony and Nintendo.
Yes and that is my point. Third party exclusives are a fucking cancer. They are anti-competitive, anti-consumer, and limit game sales. First party is not ideal but the reality of ownership makes them logical and unavoidable. Microsoft had no intention of purchasing Zenimax until it looks like Starfield may not come