What happens in less than 10 years if they don't abide by it?
Does Activision get split back out? I doubt it.
We're long past the point where you can just set rules/laws and companies will abide by it. We need to be at the point where we also list the punishment ahead of time.
Likely nothing. I don't understand why people believe in these things.
> We're long past the point where you can just set rules/laws and companies will abide by it.
What's the rule / law here anyhow? There are always workarounds, e.g. it says it will keep it in parity with xbox... well what if they called a new console something else?
No kidding. They could just introduce a new game franchise called "Duty of Call - Warfare That's Modern" and make that Xbox exclusive instead. Or any number of other workarounds and sneaky tactics.
If they write up a contract with penalty provisions, this could able be guaranteed through civil court.
It is not some crazy unsolved question as to how to get a company to commit to something in the future.
Likely Sony will take them to the cleaners.
Would they just build a COD that is dependent on specific MS tech so they cannot release it on competing systems? Why not try and rebrand Call of Duty so that it isn't in violation? Just call it 'Duty'. It starts to get very grey very quickly.
We're not, but this is pretty nebulous stuff. The state blocking freely agreed transactions because it can foresee some damage is not exactly a clear cut good, other than for people who are reassured by the idea of the state as a benevolent, all-knowing mom and pop, and for the lawyers who get paid a fortune to debate past and future hypotheticals.
What about this: allow the merger, and if the harm is done, the company must pay, but if the harm is not done, the state must pay?
Companies with more resources than small countries are often too big to regulate because they capture the regulators and/or the judiciary.
Prevention is cheaper than treatment, especially when treatments have proven so ineffective.
Regulatory capture is entirely the fault of the regulator. They don't have to be captured. They choose to be. A government body, funded by taxes, that decides to be captured, is a complete disgrace. People work hard to pay taxes, and they shouldn't be spent on employing people who choose to align with those they should be regulating.
> Prevention is cheaper than treatment, especially when treatments have proven so ineffective.
The same state that has the power to prevent has the power to treat. It chooses not to. Switching approach won't help. Getting regulators to do their jobs will.
Anyone who has worked at large corporate bureaucracies knows they are just as slow and rule bound as government departments and in many ways worse. At least there are some well motivated people in government.
Government is us. The people. We’ve delegated it to an elite class that gets more and more cut off from the common politik as time goes by.
I see no easy solution . Power does not willingly give up power.
The FTC identified not having CoD on multiple platforms as a large issue. What payment is justified if Microsoft doesn't allow CoD on multiple platforms?
It's easy to say "if harm is done, the company must pay" but look how long we've know leaded gasoline was harmful, look how long we've know abestoes was harmful, look how long we've know pfas was harmful, look how long we've know cigarettes are harmful. And then look how long it took for any company to pay after fighting tooth and nail saying it wasn't harmful despite their _own_ internal research saying the contrary.
Sure, CoD is not in the same scope as leaded gasoline. The point still remains, a harm has been identified and I don't think they should be allowed to merge so long as the punishment for that harm occurring isn't pre-determined.
What perspective has been applied to this?
We don't have to debate past and future hypotheticals - that's an invention of the "consumer welfare" theory of antitrust. The one that said it's entirely fine for, say, Apple to have a monopoly on iOS software as long as they have a prosocial justification for it. Apple's specific argument is that their monopoly protects from malware... or, in other words, they're big enough that they can make and enforce their own laws.
A better and simpler rule is this: being big is illegal, period. That's how antitrust used to work. If a business deal would give you the capability of becoming your own sovereign state, you don't get to execute that deal. If you knock out all your competition, we break you up into competing companies.
This is the sort of thing that triggers free market types, I know. My argument is specifically that large businesses get to write their own rules, and the only way to prevent them from doing that is to make them small enough that they cannot execute political power equivalent to that of a monarch. Right now, we live in this comedic parody of free market liberalism where the business owners have centralized power to themselves, turning themselves into de-facto states, and gotten the de-jure state drunk on surveillance tech to avoid scrutiny.
I'm sure Phil Spencer will be interested to know that he can fit into a can :)
All this crying about COD from Sony who is proud of how they purchase exclusivity is nonsense.
There are whole areas of games or features or characters beyond skins that Sony purchased exclusivity to. They would have bought Activision if they could afford it.
Which is 1/2 my annoyance at these veneer thick arguments in re-use constantly until the picosecond they are no longer convenient, meaning thier repeaters didn’t actually believe in the point at all.
And the other 1/2 is quite serious. If there is a market for something, it has a chance of existing. Maybe Call of Duty needs actual competition? And I don’t mean Battlefield that DICE seems intent on running into the ground.
I don’t care if MS buys Activision or not. I’m just sick of the intellectually dishonest arguments and crying about most topics.
I'd try a modern evolution of SOCOM 4 or Killzone 3 on PS4/PS5.
(Microsoft can keep their Cod B.O.)
A more than 2 year delay for the first game and never getting the rest of the series is a major downside for existing customers. That’s exactly the kind of monopolist behavior you are supposed to block mergers for. Waiting 2 years cost Microsoft a little revenue directly, but pushed XBox sales which was far more valuable.
Halo would have been a flop if it was Mac exclusive.
Keep in mind, this was back in the year ~2000. Mac market share in the home user market was a rounding error. Schools were full of iMacs, but at home, it was all Windows.
“Due out in the first half of 2000, Halo will have a simultaneous release for PC and Mac, with multiplayer compatibility between the two operating systems. While you'll need a 3D card and a powerful system to take full advantage of the game's features, it'll be scalable so you can play it on less powerful machines.” http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9907/26/halo.idg/
Things got delayed ~18 months so Microsoft could port it to XBox thus waiting till November 2001. Then tacked on another 2 years to release it on Mac.
https://www.halopedia.org/Halo:_Combat_Evolved_for_Macintosh
First Halo was delayed to port it to windows and XBox on top of that two years after its initial release they let the already working Mac version out the door. That’s a huge fuck you by any standard.
On top of this Halo 2 etc was XBox and Windows exclusive fuck PS owners, fuck Mac owners, and fuck the free market.
Maybe Microsoft should argue this point instead. But they didn't. They argued that they would allow CoD on multi-platforms so it's only reasonable to expect people to respond to that point.
It's a bit similar to how some people said that the posts deserved to be deleted while others said those people should just make their own twitter. Depending on whose talking and their argument you need to change your response. Using a response that the posts shouldn't've have been deleted to somebody who said you should make your own twitter is a non-sequitor.
That's just basic business. If I buy a shoe factory, I'm going to say of course I'll sell them to Canadians! I wouldn't say "Eh, stuff it Canada, go make your own shoes!" even if my own internal plans didn't prioritize exports.
But from what I remember is that you were accusing people of being dishonest because they said that Twitter could have an alternative but people aren't saying that Sony can just make a CoD alternative.
And I'm saying its not dishonest because A) its different people and B) Microsoft made a claim and these response are directly in response to that claim.
Remember, MS is in business to make money, not to win the console wars. Buying the CoD (etc) IP at an inflated price and then immediately cutting off more than half of the revenue would be so mind-boggingly stupid, almost to the point of malpractice. This is why they really don't even need to be forced into saying they'll maintain it for 10 years on PS.
It's all about moving gaming to a recurring revenue model. So you don't care about if the consumer made a one time purchase of your console (in fact, you might even prefer they didn't if you're losing money on each one!), but you do care about the fact that they're playing your games.
Ben Thompson put it better than I could:
> Notice that this is for games that are purchased, and keep in mind that Microsoft’s goal with the Activision acquisition is not to gain exclusive games to sell but rather games to subscribe to. As I’ve argued the only way this acquisition makes sense is the extent to which it makes possible a new business model for gaming; simply buying exclusives via established titles like Call of Duty would be hugely value destructive.
>What is notable about Microsoft’s subscription push is that it aligns the company’s Xbox division with Microsoft’s overall push towards cloud computing and subscription services. What is interesting to consider are two questions:
>First, would Microsoft have ever gone down this path absent the investment in its original (failed) Xbox strategy? I would argue the answer is no; this is a reasonable leveraging of Xbox assets, but I do wonder if Microsoft could go back two decades if they would even bother.
>Second, if regulators were to kill this deal (Microsoft still needs approval from the UK and the US) would Xbox be long for this world? It’s hard to see how the division makes sense if Microsoft has the current business model dictated to them, given just how dominant Sony is with said business model.
https://stratechery.com/2023/uk-blocks-microsoft-activision-... (paywalled)
I just don't really get the argument of "We won't do this for 10 years". OK, what about after that?
Case in point: Sony PlayStation is one of Azure’s largest customers
It’s strange for Nintendo not to see this
Skyrim has supposedly sold around 60 million copies over the span of 12 years. Let's be generous and say those sold at an average of $60 each (probably less in practice due to sales, etc.)
That's $3.6b USD in raw revenue. Pretty sick!
On the other hand, as of 2022 (Skyrim numbers are 2023), Call of Duty as a franchise had generated over $31b USD in raw revenue. 10x that of Skyrim, Bethesda's biggest title.
So in terms of scale, I don't see how making Starfield exclusive can possibly be on the same level as the idea of making the whole CoD franchise exclusive. Certainly it would be impactful but I can understand treating them differently.
Microsoft are REALLY good at playing the long game.
My disagreement would be that you're comparing an installment with a franchise. The whole of the Elder Scrolls is bigger than Skyrim, although Skyrim was the biggest standalone seller. Elder Scrolls online has I think about 750k MAUs, at $10-$15/mo.
And, I suppose more fundamentally, why would MS turn down a good chunk of $3.6b for the dev costs of making a Playstation version of Starfield?
funny thing is that if you compared the last 15 years of COD to Elder scrolls, you're still comparing some dozen COD games to Skyrim and ESO. And I guess that one mobile game? 15 years ago is still a year after Oblivion launched.
So why are Redfall and Starfield Xbox exclusives? Wouldn't they make more money by releasing them for Playstation too?
CoD on the other hand is already a huge name, that releases every year (i.e. recurring revenue, even if it's not a subscription per se), and MS is paying a huge premium for it. Forcing people over to game pass in that case isn't worth taking the hit to reliable revenue you're virtually already guaranteed to get from PS owners.
To be clear: I think it's less important to worry about this as less of a PC/Xbox exclusive than a Game Pass exclusive/available. I'd be willing to bet if Sony approached MS to bring Game Pass to PS, MS would be super willing to do it. Not that Sony would given their business model, but that's basically the point. It's not HW platform exclusivity, but store/subscription exclusivity.
Fair if you want to posit that VR is a niche market. But.... honestly, so is the entire Xbox market.
Microsoft's subscription push can't work without winning the console wars since Sony isn't about to let them put GamePass on PS since that kills Sony's revenue model. (That would itself be a very interesting antitrust case.)
So they still want to win the console wars, they just want to monetize that victory differently. But pulling things like Starfield - and eventually COD - off of other platforms is 10000% still aligned with "making as much money as possible."
because at this point, even if Xbox's weren't profitable, ending the Xbox brand would harm confidence in Gamepass.
Not that Xbox isn't profitable. But even in the worst case they have negative incentive to pull out.
Embrace the business (with money), extend the functionality (Xbox exclusive features), Extinguish the competition (drop support).
"The slow blade penetrates the shield."
They're clearly "Ok, we have more room to legally get away with XYZ now so LETS GO FOR IT!!!!"
Feels like these kind of issues are what anti-trust should have handled.
That lock in of the 90's never really stopped, they just figure out how to make it look better. The only times they gave up on the lock in was when it was starting to look really bad and even then they just pivot the messaging and then try to lock themselves in. Look at MS with "We love Linux", it didn't slow Windows down one bit.
https://www.khronos.org/blog/you-can-use-vulkan-without-pipe...
Which is refreshing.
Most games rely on engines that support Vulkan better now (like UE5), so there is not much of an interest I guess.
I’m surprised people didn’t wake up with the One era lies he kept pushing, and given HNs general distaste for “marketer talk”, how can one be a fan of a dude that every time he opens his mouth, it’s marketing talk (when it’s not a lie). This dude would constantly say shit like “the console wars are stupid. We need to all get along”. And then when pressed about “hidden DGPU” that he knew didn’t exist, he lies and responds “we are not letting Sony have a hardware advantage”. This dude is a scumbag.
He’s been terrible for Xbox, and now his horrid management of Xbox has led to being terrible for gaming in general.
Big fan? Nah.
None of it really matter though, because even forgetting Phil obviously constantly fanning the console wars, he’s presided over Xbox for what like 10 years? In that time, what he’s managed to do is be a baby, and complain that his ineffective management is leading to their console having no games.
To me it's incomprehensible how they managed to f-up Halo Infinite, then just stand there in silence and then say, yeah we are sorry for not having a lot of interesting titles on Xbox, but here's what's coming next year.
If I were a game dev at Microsoft, I'd be furious!
Yeah, heard that one before.
> Oh but we promised Call of Duty and this is Duty Called, so we don't have to care about anything we have promised before.
I mean, this is Microsoft.
Optimistically, Sony utilizes their Bungie aquisition and makes something worthy as a competitor. I imagine the 10 years is less a promise and more of a timer, and 10 years is enough for a AAA company to get at least a few attempts.
Pessimistically, MS drives Activision to the ground and COD isn't even a valuable IP anymore. Bigger icons have fallen from grace faster.
I work in gaming at Microsoft and I really enjoy it. I think Microsoft gives us a ton of space to explore and make our own impact and I am a huge can of Phil Spencer.
> Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision has been described as the largest in tech history. It deserves scrutiny. That scrutiny has paid off: Microsoft has committed in writing, in public, and in court to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation for 10 years on parity with Xbox.
How does this make anyone feel any better? What happens after 10 years? Microsoft has been around for 4x that long.