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Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

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Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#641

Post by ls612 »

atlasunshrugged wrote: post #269
panick21_ wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anti-Trust is not magic, its no longer a tool politicans can wield like a club against things they don't like. The courts have a definition and you actually have to prove abuse for those law-suits to do anything. Doing so if you can do it at all takes decades. Unless politicians make major changes to the anti-trust law its unlikely to be effective. And doing so would require major action in congress. The president co…

Sure, but sometimes the threat of doing something and having an acquisition mired in a lawsuit or the Prez using the bully pulpit against your co can be a serious deterrent from engaging in an acquisition as well.

Yeah look how well that worked out for the previous administration vis a vis AT&T and Time Warner.

Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#642

Post by JAlexoid »

ho_schi wrote: post #519

Competition oversight? Probably dead since Regan? After they stopped controlling AT&T the UNIX-Wars happened, impcompatiblity, lawsuits, closed-source has become a normal thing and proprietary software locked users in and competitors out. What platform will Microsoft support? Likely not: * Linux * BSD * MacOS * Nintendo * Sony Does anyone miss id Software? Native ports on Linux, incredible source-code and impressive…

What does this have to do with competition?

Console platforms have not competed for games to be on their platforms for.... ever.

Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#644

Post by indigochill »

awill wrote: post #604
Server6 wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sony spent 20+ years building up and planning their 1st party studios. Microsoft could do that too, but it would take 20 more years. They don't have the time for that and acquisition is really their only option. I don't like it either, but that's the reality of it.

Agree. If I were in charge at MS, I might have done this too. I can't blame them. But I imagine Sony execs are struggling to comprehend what's going on. They've done so much right in the last few years. They've built some of the best studios in the world. They've delivered the best exclusive AAA content. Just in the last few years: The Last of us Part 2, Ghosts of Tsushima, God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn, Uncharted...…

Sony's also been historically resistant to letting their exclusives reach PC. That's slowly changing (God of War just hit PC in the past few days and Horizon's been out for a while), but I don't think this really did them any favors. Sure, they need to sell hardware, but there's a long tail on PC sales that can outlive generations of consoles. Microsoft, meanwhile, probably more than any other tech giant today, is the master of the long tail.

Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#645

Post by chronogram »

laputan_machine wrote: post #161
mchesters wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nvidia/Arm comes to mind as a recent acquisition prevented.

Because of the UK's CMA. the US equivalent does not seem to care about preventing these giant mergers as much. https://www.gov.uk/cma-cases/nvidia-slash-arm-merger-inquiry

“Mergers: Commission opens in-depth investigation into proposed acquisition of Arm by NVIDIA” 27 October 2021 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_21_...

“FTC Sues to Block $40 Billion Semiconductor Chip Merger” 2 December 2021 https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2021/12/ftc-s...

Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#646

Post by HeavyStorm »

andrewparker wrote: post #581
curiousllama wrote: post #315

It's wild how Microsoft has been able to vertically integrate gaming. They now own the distribution (Xbox Cloud Gaming, Xbox Game Pass), the games (Call of Duty, WoW, Starcraft + what they owned before), the OS (Windows, Xbox), the hardware (Xbox, many PCs), and the back end compute (Azure). The only thing they're missing, the network bandwidth, is mostly a commodity anyway. That's a heck of a moat.

Creation layer of the stack: Unity or Unreal.

Visual Studio is still there, although losing market share

Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#647

Post by JAlexoid »

cma wrote: post #568
JAlexoid wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think they will. There's no point. There is a stable duopoly, where Microsoft can reap the benefits of competition between the two, without wasting any resources. May not be best for consumer - really great for business. (especially, if courts hold that Apple/Google cannot outright ban apps from their stores)

> There is a stable duopoly, where Microsoft can reap the benefits of competition between the two, without wasting any resources. The huge competition where both charge 30% of gross sales, far higher than even the federal corporate tax rate, which is only charged on the net.

And they don't have to spend billions on building and maintaining their own platform.

Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#649

Post by zymhan »

reducesuffering wrote: post #635
zymhan wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are very much a commodity.

Nvidia and AMD, of $650B and $160B market caps, make commodities?!

I'm not sure what market cap has to do with it? BHP Billiton is an _actual_ commodity (mining) company with a market cap similar to AMD [1]

GPUs aren't commodities in the traditional sense, it's more of a figure of speech to convey how interchangeable and standardized GPUs are nowadays.

[1] https://www.google.com/finance/quote/BHP:NYSE

Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#650

Post by jgon »

It really feels like Microsoft is trying to basically create the "Netflix" of gaming here, and I think that just like Netflix they're going to see a lot of success as basically being the first to market to do so, and other companies are going to be left scrambling. The acquisition email mentioned that activision has 400 million "monthly active players", mimicing the language of MAU that is the current trend right now. The goal is to get 1/2 a billion people giving them $10 a month on gamepass, not to get 1 time purchases for $60 every 5 years when a new Elder Scrolls title ships.

I think that this should really put some fear in Valve and I'm not sure what their play is from here. I know that Steam has a lot of goodwill built up but it feels like they've just coasted on Steam for so long, and it was inevitable that the larger players would look at their fat 30% cut for so little work and decide that wasn't going to last. A lot of people thought that Bethesda games would keep coming out for Playstation when the acquisition was first announced, and after it closed MS confirmed that going forward future title would be exclusive to them. I can't see any reason to this this will different, and especially just making these titles available through gamepass alone, not in a launcher or as a separate purchase. Do people think that Microsoft is spending tens of billions just to make sure that Valve can get a 30% cut on sales of COD and Fallout? It's like saying that Netflix is going to let Disney+ carry Stranger Things, because hey, Disney would pay them money to do so. Valve is like the cable company right now, someone else makes the content and they provide the delivery of it and skim off the top. Now that you have competing and more convenient delivery services, its going to be a lot harder to exist. Where do they go from here?

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