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Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

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Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#661

Post by bobthepanda »

paulpan wrote: post #438
agd wrote: post #53

With these kind of acquisitions, other companies are going to find it very hard to compete with Game Pass. I think we'll look back in 10 years and wonder why antitrust regulators did nothing, but it may be too late by then.

It'll depend on the perspective. For the gaming industry, this seems to push Microsoft into 3rd place (by size) behind Sony and Tencent. So hardly a monopoly and akin to T-Mobile's acquisition of Sprint a few years ago. It makes Microsoft much more competitive against Sony and even Nintendo since it'll likely bolster their 1P offerings in the future. But if Microsoft uses their ownership to favor their own game subsc…

It should be worth noting that T-mobile + Sprint succeeded on the third try after the first two were more or less blocked by regulators in the same decade (it didn't actually get all the way to them, but they signaled there was no way they would approved.)

The only reason it got approved the third time was that regulators were convinced that either way, the US would only have three mobile operators because it did not look like Sprint could be a going concern.

Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#662

Post by no_wizard »

mathattack wrote: post #560
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.

People may be flooding into vertical integration, though the history of that isn’t great. (Look at AOL/TimeWarner or Verizon/AOL/Tumblr/Yahoo) All it takes is missing one generation and the house of cards gets written down. Someone can create the next generation blockbuster for a lot less than $69bln. To argue against myself, they’ve become a lot better at picking trends since Balmer left too.

I think vertical integration tends to win when the floor is built atop of commodities. The new consoles have similar hardware[0] and it really comes down to allocation of those hardware resources, which makes first party studios ways to differentiate your product from the competition, as you can justify the extra cost to make sure your first party console is optimized for in its unique ways, where cross publishing houses don't always do that, for example. This can differentiate gaming experience, even for titles that are cross platform, if one is optimized for say, the Xbox ecosystem, but its PlayStation port does not have the same kind of optimizations. How much this matters may remain to be seen, for now.

Having highly optimized flagship titles though is what makes these vertical integrations so appealing in this market, in my estimation.

[0]: https://www.tomsguide.com/news/ps5-vs-xbox-series-x

FWIW I don't endorse everything in the link to toms guide, I just wanted a reliable source for hardware specs

Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#663

Post by perbu »

strulovich wrote: post #162
palijer wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I looked around for a while, a d I can't actually find a list of any mergers that antitrust regulations actually prevented. I'm assuming some survivor bias is involved here and we don't hear about the ones that stopped early, but it seems that what I and most folks assume antitrust regulations do is different than what actually happens. I remember the Sirius/XM merge and how those were the only two players in the mar…

Meta’s (Facebook) acquisition of Giphy got blocked by European regulators iirc.

UK, I think. Still a weird decision. Of all the stuff Facebook bought they blocked Giphy. Not Whatsapp, Instagram, etc.

Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#664

Post by phendrenad2 »

sofixa wrote: post #319
fourseventy wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This acquisition makes Microsoft the third biggest gaming company in the world... Not even the biggest, and far from a monopoly...

Don't get hung up on "monopoly". Their games are only available on their own vertically integrated platforms. They're abusing their dominant market position and should be slapped hard ( full break up and multi billion fines).

That means Nintendo should be slapped "hard" too, since we're not getting hung up on legal definitions.

Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#665

Post by bduerst »

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.

They get away with that because it's a two-sided market and they have all the consumers. Microsoft tried to woo devs on Windows phone and it didn't work, because consumers didn't follow.

Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#666

Post by GuB-42 »

kizer wrote: post #586
andrewparker wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creation layer of the stack: Unity or Unreal.

Next headline: MS to acquire Epic Games? Tencent is in the way there. Really, I could see them launching their own engine. Think of all the studios and talent they have now. They have the engines behind Halo, CoD, WoW, Overwatch. Could build an Unreal competitor.

Microsoft already has id Software! Epic Games historical competitor. id Software has Quake, Epic Games has Unreal.

id Software is not the company it once was, but they still make engines. idTech 7 is their last one, powering Doom Eternal.

Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#667

Post by brobdingnagians »

Activision Blizzard has been seriously mismanaged. They have very nice IP and a fanbase that is still somewhat loyal because of the glories of the past, but Microsoft would need to revitalize the management and the creativity.

- Overwatch hit the ground running to massive success, but hasn't materialized Overwatch 2 and has stagnated.

- Warcraft III Reforged is a total disaster and abandoned.

- WoW has a wide following of people in its vanilla form (i.e. taking things awy from what it has become), and the extensions aren't bringing a lot of value. There is speculation on whether it has hit its peak and is in decline.

- The Starcraft Remaster is basically the same game but with a bit nicer graphics.

- Diablo 3 seems to have done well.

I do hope it gets revitalized and the IP gets new life with better management, but Blizzard has been struggling.

Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#668

Post by shadowgovt »

xhrpost wrote: post #655

I have to wonder how much investing in some of today's tech behemoths comes down to viewing them more as a holding company / investment firm and less about their original core products. Microsoft has lost tons of desktop share over the last decade, this should have been a death signal for them but instead amazing acquisitions like Mojang, GitHub, ActBliz have pushed them to an amazing market cap. Similar with FB loos…

In a rapidly-changing marketplace, a certain level of diversification helps increase the odds of survival (it can be overdone; too much diversification, and a company finds itself in charge of a host of projects in industries it doesn't know enough about to compete, which is what put Marvel on the rocks so badly that Disney was able to snap them up back in the day).

Not unlike in nature, a monoculture corporation lives and dies by their business being at all relevant in general, and the market (especially in the entertainment sector) is fickle.

Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#669

Post by bduerst »

u2077 wrote: post #352
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.

This is what I’m worried about. With them owning both the games and the OS that they are played on, we could be forced into a subscription. Paying to own may be a thing of the past.

Paying to own is already a thing of the past for music and movie content. How is this different?
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