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Ignore Microsoft’s whines about the Activision takeover. The CMA did its job

theguardian.com

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Re: Ignore Microsoft’s whines about the Activision takeover. The CMA did its job

#151

Post by badwolf »

sofixa wrote: post #60
daniel-s wrote: post #18

I don't mind the complaint about CMA being undemocratic because it's a council of unelected bureaucrats, it's just trash-talk from someone that didn't get what they wanted; to be expected. IMO the reason why this decision is really dumb is because the reason given was cloud gaming. I think that people are missing this. This isn't a market. Almost nobody plays on cloud gaming platforms, like Stadia which recently clos…

> This isn't a market. Almost nobody plays on cloud gaming platforms, like Stadia which recently closed down, or similar. It's a market. Google bungling Stadia doesn't make it any less of a market, or we wouldn't be seeing Microsoft, Nvidia and Amazon (to a much lesser extent) pouring money into it. Regardless of your bubble, lots of people use cloud gaming services. There is no way to have concrete numbers, but the…

> the Stadia subreddit still has 110k subscribers

How many of those 110k reddit users are/were actual Stadia subscribers though?

Just because someone subscribes to a subreddit, doesn't mean they are now, or were ever subscribed to the actual product.

Re: Ignore Microsoft’s whines about the Activision takeover. The CMA did its job

#152

Post by Karunamon »

Zpalmtree wrote: post #148
Karunamon wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but that's not the regulator's problem either. It's not as if there is some sacrosanct right for companies to merge that is being abrogated. The entire existence of a company is at the pleasure of government.

Is that meant to be a good thing?

That's meant to be an explanation of how things are without making a value judgment. For-profit corporations are not people with human rights, they are amoral impersonal constructs, legitimized entirely by the state, intended to serve the economy. If they are not doing that adequately, for instance, by introducing monopolization concerns on a market, their behavior can be arbitrarily restricted.

Re: Ignore Microsoft’s whines about the Activision takeover. The CMA did its job

#153

Post by trynumber9 »

It is a tough one. Microsoft is already huge and has some unclear intentions. They say they want some killer apps to serve as flagship games. But Sony is concerned they'll stop releasing games for Playstation. However the Xbox division is so far behind Sony it doesn't seem particularly worrying to me.

Microsoft looks like a giant in gaming when including PC gaming but there Valve takes most the distribution money.

Re: Ignore Microsoft’s whines about the Activision takeover. The CMA did its job

#154

Post by bobthepanda »

PaulHoule wrote: post #85
daniel-s wrote: post #18

I don't mind the complaint about CMA being undemocratic because it's a council of unelected bureaucrats, it's just trash-talk from someone that didn't get what they wanted; to be expected. IMO the reason why this decision is really dumb is because the reason given was cloud gaming. I think that people are missing this. This isn't a market. Almost nobody plays on cloud gaming platforms, like Stadia which recently clos…

It made no sense at all, but there was a time when major parts of the game industry was talking about cloud gaming as if it were a thing and the media was going along. Normally we have to let lies and bullshit from corporations wash over us, all we can do is complain on forums and still have to argue with Kool Aid drinkers. If bullshit over cloud gaming meant Microsoft couldn't get what they wanted then it is payback…

The reason cloud gaming comes up because on the off chance someone makes it work, it's a very lucrative market with a high barrier to entry.

Steam is still pretty much undisputed leader in today's games marketplace and it's a very comfortable position worth billions of dollars. And that's just on one platform.

Re: Ignore Microsoft’s whines about the Activision takeover. The CMA did its job

#155

Post by Zpalmtree »

sofixa wrote: post #79
Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citation?

Take a look at Switzerland. Universal suffrage only became universally applied when courts forced the last holdout cantons, in the 1990s . They also recently refused decarbonision efforts because those would result in higher taxes. Masses of common people are fundamentally unprepared for voting and compromising on important and complex legislation. That's why (supposedly expert) agencies and lawmakers exist, to handl…

Switzerland seems to be doing pretty well? Why do you think they have to vote for the policies you want for it to be a good idea?

Re: Ignore Microsoft’s whines about the Activision takeover. The CMA did its job

#156

Post by gdsdfe »

manuelabeledo wrote: post #112
gdsdfe wrote: post #100

this is honestly the most bizzare story in gaming ... first you have Sony that claims this acquisition will give MS an unfair advantage in cloud gaming yet they run all their cloud workloads on Azure, then you have the UK that agrees with Sony yet we all know they're just afraid that all the Activision players would leave their platform. And now people are acting like MS is the bad guy because what? they have money?

They both have money. Using what one could only qualify as an utility from a competitor, does not make Sony any less right. Apple uses Google Cloud, Netflix runs on AWS. > ... the UK that agrees with Sony yet we all know they're just afraid that all the Activision players would leave their platform Yes, because the platform is not Azure, is Windows and by extension, Xbox.

you really don't think a multi million dollar bill annually doesn't benefit MS ?! funny enough xbox runs a windows kernel

Re: Ignore Microsoft’s whines about the Activision takeover. The CMA did its job

#158

Post by WeylandYutani »

Zpalmtree wrote: post #148
Karunamon wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but that's not the regulator's problem either. It's not as if there is some sacrosanct right for companies to merge that is being abrogated. The entire existence of a company is at the pleasure of government.

Is that meant to be a good thing?

Preferable to the reverse (unless you're American I suppose).

Re: Ignore Microsoft’s whines about the Activision takeover. The CMA did its job

#159

Post by babypuncher »

snowski3 wrote: post #69

If you read the report then the CMA comes across terribly. They don't understand basic technical facts. Apparently a competitor to Microsoft told the CMA that they solved latency issues with cloud gaming by increasing GPU power. Someone should alert the nobel prize committee about conquering the speed of light. They make other bizarre claims like apparently everyone that subscribes to xbox game pass does so for cloud…

> Its obvious to anyone with a brain that peer-to-peer is the way forward with game streaming because it solves the latency problems.

How would this work exactly?

Re: Ignore Microsoft’s whines about the Activision takeover. The CMA did its job

#160

Post by babypuncher »

COGlory wrote: post #92
snowski3 wrote: post #69

If you read the report then the CMA comes across terribly. They don't understand basic technical facts. Apparently a competitor to Microsoft told the CMA that they solved latency issues with cloud gaming by increasing GPU power. Someone should alert the nobel prize committee about conquering the speed of light. They make other bizarre claims like apparently everyone that subscribes to xbox game pass does so for cloud…

>If you read the report then the CMA comes across terribly. They don't understand basic technical facts. Apparently a competitor to Microsoft told the CMA that they solved latency issues with cloud gaming by increasing GPU power. Someone should alert the nobel prize committee about conquering the speed of light. This is because input latency goes down if you run at a higher framerate. Nvidia worked on this and publis…

Yes, increasing framerate reduces latency. But you quickly reach a point of diminishing returns, and no amount of framerate increase is going to overcome the baseline network latency, where the speed of light is a real and noticeable problem for anyone not very close to the datacenter their stream is coming from.
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