[HN Gopher] UK Blocks Microsoft's $69B Activision Deal
___________________________________________________________________
UK Blocks Microsoft's $69B Activision Deal
Author : jmsflknr
Score : 557 points
Date : 2023-04-26 11:17 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bloomberg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bloomberg.com)
| kripy wrote:
| https://archive.md/m784j
| asmor wrote:
| I really wish we could have a _different kind_ of competition in
| gaming (and some other sectors).
|
| I miss the good old days when everything was on Steam. I wish
| there was some middle ground between everyone paying 30% to Valve
| and running 10 launchers at once. And now, with subscription
| models making their way in, it even more closely resembles the
| development of Netflix. There should be an industry standard
| launcher, just as there should be an industry standard cloud
| gaming standard. As it is now, only one of them is really usable
| with reasonable latency where I live, and it lacks a lot of games
| because NVIDIA refused to put their foot down on "we just provide
| a computer, not a platform".
|
| This competition is parallel worlds that pretend their
| competitors do not exist and where customer choice doesn't exist
| (unless you're really not picky about what to play).
| nonethewiser wrote:
| > I miss the good old days when everything was on Steam.
|
| Well, this is 1 step further from everything being on gamepass
| saos wrote:
| The CMA have always done a solid job. Glad they blocked this.
| deepzn wrote:
| Probably consumers might benefit from concentration of gaming
| titles within Xbox for more seamless experiences. But, arguably
| very destructive in the long run. As this is a major INDEPENDENT
| studio, not only for multiplatform but also for deciding the
| titles/projects they produce.
|
| As we see with the HBO Max/Discovery merger, once companies
| merge, they have the option to close or end projects, that is
| destructive to both consumers and the creators of those.
|
| Furthermore, these are trillion dollar companies, that are almost
| getting if not already way past the size of "Too Big To Fail".
| These companies need to be reigned in, if we are trying to create
| mobility in the private sector, as well as consumer choice, and
| avoid monopolization currently already in tech.
| saos wrote:
| I'm so happy
| [deleted]
| sylware wrote:
| Is this true?
|
| The dev studio of redfall was bought by msft, then the
| playstation build was scraped.
|
| If true, I would have expected msft to be more cunningly smart,
| namely to provide a playstation build... but significantly worse
| than the windoz/xbox builds.
|
| The only way msft could restore confidence would be to provide
| top notch elf/linux builds of ALL games of ALL its studios (not a
| few games here and there, and hardly any "significant" ones).
|
| Idem for sony though.
| paol wrote:
| Thank $deity someone did. Microsoft owning both the biggest
| platforms and the biggest publishers is a glaring example of what
| anti-trust regulations should exist to prevent.
|
| Every anti-trust regulator in the world would have auto-blocked
| the merger after 5 minutes of examining the situation.
| Unfortunately actual anti-trust enforcement seems to have fallen
| entirely out of fashion.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Thank $deity someone did. Microsoft owning both the biggest
| platforms and the biggest publishers is a glaring example of
| what anti-trust regulations should exist to prevent._
|
| I can't speak for the UK, but in the US, there are plenty of
| industries where the creator of a product is not also allowed
| to be the distributor of the product.
|
| Movie companies aren't allowed to own theaters. In most states,
| auto makers aren't allowed to own dealerships. Beer companies
| aren't allowed to own bars. The list goes on.
| MikusR wrote:
| Microsoft is 3rd place on consoles, non-existent on pc, non-
| existent on mobile. And this deal would have moved it to 3rd
| place in publishing.
| drumhead wrote:
| >non-existent on pc
|
| Hmmmmmmmm........
| Hamuko wrote:
| > _non-existent on pc_
|
| What's the share of PC gaming on Microsoft Windows vs. not on
| Microsoft Windows?
| MikusR wrote:
| They don't get any money from people playing on Windows.
| All the money goes to Valve
| thehappypm wrote:
| Isnt gaming a big draw to buying Windows in the first
| place?
| Vermeulen wrote:
| Your mostly correct - but it's wrong to say 'non-
| existent' on PC due to how successful PC Game Pass is
| gpm wrote:
| They make money from people playing on Windows. Windows
| licensing fees directly. And indirectly by getting people
| into their software ecosystem.
|
| Just because they don't make additional money from game
| sales doesn't mean they aren't making money.
| Hamuko wrote:
| My gaming PC doesn't have a Windows license because I
| like Microsoft or Windows.
|
| Written on my Mac Studio.
| poloniculmov wrote:
| Thanks to Proton, most games work on Linux, as long as they
| don't have any anti-cheat rootkits.
| Hamuko wrote:
| ProtonDB rates 28% of the top 1000 games as platinum
| ("runs perfectly out of the box"). The rest either need
| some tweaks, have some issues, or just don't work. My
| assumption is that most gamers don't care too much tweak
| with their games, so I wouldn't put that much weight on
| the gold category. And when it comes to silver and below,
| that can be pretty nasty.
|
| And when looking at the top 20 most played games on
| Steam, there's some pretty big titles missing. PUBG (5th
| most played) is borked, CoD MWII (6th) is borked, Destiny
| 2 (9th) is borked, Rainbow Six Siege (10th) is borked,
| FIFA 23 (11th) is borked, NARAKA: BLADEPOINT (13th) is
| silver, Rust (14th) is bronze and Dead by Daylight (20th)
| is bronze. So when it comes to "most players", there's
| definitely a lot of gaps too.
|
| I have a Steam Deck and I can have pretty good gaming
| experiences on it. Surprisingly even. But it's definitely
| not perfect, and one of the reasons why I can feel pretty
| confident in owning a Steam Deck is that I still have a
| Windows-based gaming PC that I can fall back on.
| 0x457 wrote:
| Don't know about the rest, but destiny 2 works fine on
| linux...you will just get banned by anti-cheat. The only
| reason you can't play Destiny 2 on linux is because
| Bungie won't allow it. It even has working anti-cheat.
| seattle_spring wrote:
| So the only online games you can play on Linux are full
| of blatant cheaters?
| paol wrote:
| > non-existent on pc
|
| You may want to think a little longer on that ;)
| MikusR wrote:
| So should you.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| Xbox has a digital marketplace on which game developers
| (sometimes a dreaded _publisher_ ) sell games and
| Microsoft gets a cut of the deal. Microsoft makes money
| because a game is sold on the Xbox digital marketplace.
| Microsoft has no (popular) equivalent to Steam, GoG, Epic
| Games Store, etc., and as such have no (popular) way of
| monetizing PC games sales.
|
| (As in, we're still talking about a games market and not
| an OS market. OP doesn't have to rethink their claim that
| MS is "non-existent on pc" because they practically are.)
| snapcaster wrote:
| As a MSFT shareholder I agree. As a citizen of the world I
| think it's fine to stop multi trillion dollar companies from
| expanding anymore regardless of impact and I think most
| reasonable people would agree
| nonethewiser wrote:
| That's not what anti trust means though. If that's the
| reasoning the commission acting outside it's purpose.
| AraceliHarker wrote:
| If you are a shareholder of MSFT, please tell them to stop
| making Windows 11 full of ads.
| samstave wrote:
| >> _to stop making Windows 11 full_ STOP
|
| W11 is utter trash (as I type this from W11 PC and when I
| mouse over to the left, it pulls up ads ... how can I
| block this at my router? anyone know the domains it pulls
| from. I need a blacklist of all MS ad domains.
|
| Also, here was something that just happened this morning
| ;; I opened my machine, and I clicked on the firefox menu
| icon, and it fucking opened microsoft EDGE. It HIJACKED
| the firefox icon.
|
| I had to reboot... and it added a fucking "search bing"
| thing to my menu bar... WHAT THE FUCK. I didnt set this
| up.
|
| Why is W11 making ANY changes to my machine
| autonomously????????
|
| https://i.imgur.com/F8jdaUH.png
|
| https://i.imgur.com/mBos3Do.jpg
| eatsyourtacos wrote:
| I am still _baffled_ they even made W11. I really thought
| Windows10 was going to turn into like... Windows. As in,
| they just keep updating it- why the hell do we need more
| versions!
| web3-is-a-scam wrote:
| The self-ware Bing/Sydney AI is procreating.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| Do you think this will actually have a good outcome for UK
| gamers? I can definitely foresee UK gamers not having access to
| products.
| joosters wrote:
| No-one is going to stop selling games in the UK, they would
| be leaving money on the table if they did.
|
| Instead, they might move development away from the UK. Bad
| for developers, sure.
| drumhead wrote:
| I dont see how development would be affected.
| [deleted]
| tombert wrote:
| I think I agree, but would this logic apply to Nintendo in the
| mid-80's? I think that (at least in the United States), the NES
| was probably the biggest game console, and Nintendo was almost
| certainly the biggest publisher for it.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _I think I agree, but would this logic apply to Nintendo in
| the mid-80 's? I think that (at least in the United States),
| the NES was probably the biggest game console, and Nintendo
| was almost certainly the biggest publisher for it._
|
| Maybe not at the beginning because home video games were new
| and different, and there was plenty of competition from Sega
| and Atari and others.
|
| But in a related note, Atari was forced to create a new
| company to publish some of its coin-op games to fend off
| monopoly accusations. (It later turned out to just be a shell
| game.)
| rprospero wrote:
| Nintendo was taken to court and forced to pay out over anti-
| competitive business practices. Granted, the specific charge
| was price fixing and the settlement of sending coupons to
| consumers was ridiculous, but I could imagine an FTC that
| wasn't asleep at the wheel who split the company's hardware
| and software divisions.
| edgyquant wrote:
| No, the industry was new and not worth close to what it is
| now. Plus a lot different, arcades we're still pretty
| dominate at that time.
| jxi wrote:
| I'm just glad Activision doesn't get paid out. What a terrible
| company it has become. Really wish they never acquired Blizzard.
| mattferderer wrote:
| This might be a bad time to tell you that they might be getting
| paid out in terms of $2.5 - 3 billion for the deal falling
| through.
| javajosh wrote:
| And what a strange end for the mighty Blizzard. I wonder what
| the owners of Blizzard thought would happen when they sold in
| 2008. I bet it even mattered to them at that time, at least a
| little.
| nottorp wrote:
| Did it? I don't think Blizzard has ever been in financial
| trouble, so they sold it just for more money. And we all know
| the old Blizzard is completely dead now.
| slavik81 wrote:
| In 2008, Blizzard was owned by Vivendi Universal, which is a
| giant conglomerate that owns a seemingly random assortment of
| media properties.
|
| Vivendi has gone through so many mergers, acquisitions and
| divestitures over the years that I find it hard to imagine
| them having a sentimental attachment to a particular business
| unit.
|
| Blizzard has pretty much always just been one part of a
| larger organization. It was sold in the 90s.
| segasaturn wrote:
| Yeah Blizzard is doomed because of this block. Activision
| doesn't give a rip about Blizzard's IPs (there's a running
| joke in the StarCraft 2 community that the game is being
| maintained by a single unpaid intern). Sad day especially for
| the StarCraft 2 community who were hopeful about the
| acquisition saving their beloved series.
| mouzogu wrote:
| mr kotick going to have to buy a smaller yacht i'm afraid.
| smcleod wrote:
| Good. Governments should be block FAR more acquisitions. We need
| more small to mid sized companies and far fewer mega corps.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Really? Cloud gaming is where this gets killed off?
|
| I suppose they can't really block the merger for their exclusive
| titles seeing as all of Microsofts's competitors are the same or
| worse when it comes to exclusives, but I'm still surprised
| someone managed to convince these people that cloud gaming was
| going to be the way this merger was going to bite people in the
| arse.
|
| I do hope regulatory bodies will maintain these decisions across
| other platforms as well (i.e. Sony's acquisitions, Epic Games)
| but I'm not sure that's realistic if cloud gaming is cited as the
| main reason why two tech conglomerates merging is a bad idea.
| thepratt wrote:
| https://archive.is/2mV5g
| kman82 wrote:
| Microsoft is an American company. Activision-Blizzard is an
| American company. I get that the UK is an important market but
| how can their regulators block a deal that possibly most of the
| rest of the world wants. Who determines that the UK has the power
| to block this? Can somebody legally explain this to me ELI5?
| chaosbolt wrote:
| What am I missing here? I thought both Microsoft and Activision
| were American companies, why would the UK even have a say in
| this? Is it a "if you buy it you can't operate here" kind of
| statement?
| Culonavirus wrote:
| That's my understanding too. At the end of the day, I'm sure
| this will be a PITA, but what stops Activision from spinning
| off its UK business operations into a separate entity that will
| not be part of the Activision-Microsoft deal?
|
| Not to mention that the only part of distribution this can
| affect is the physical one. I mean, if I want to sell a game on
| Steam and sell it in all the regions Steam operates in, I can
| do so without needing a business presence in every individual
| country...
| nonethewiser wrote:
| That's a good question. I don't recall ever seeing something
| like this happening.
| fnbr wrote:
| I was about to ask the same thing. Why does this matter? It's
| like when the Canadian Parliament subpoenaed Mark Zuckerberg-
| he just ignored it [1].
|
| [1]: https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/27/tech/zuckerberg-contempt-
| cana...
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Never demand something which you can't enforce. Signals major
| weakness.
| summerlight wrote:
| Not only the UK government still has a significant power to
| leverage here, but also corporate doesn't usually want to
| directly go to war against governments since that's going to be
| an alarming signal for all other governments across the globe,
| especially EU who is actively seeking a way to regulate US big
| techs. Even US cannot protect them without a good
| justification.
| elAhmo wrote:
| Good! There is no sane reason to allow Microsoft to own one more
| company and just become bigger in another market.
|
| It has nothing to do with their core business (which is quite
| diverse to be fair), and as an end consumer, on average, this
| would just cause harm long term, considering consoles and gaming
| market in general.
|
| One example: Call of Duty. Might not be important for many
| people, but having CoD become unavailable on the most popular
| console, just because someone had huge amounts of money and
| bought a $69B dollar company doesn't sound fair and would be a
| net loss for the industry.
| PretzelPirate wrote:
| > but having CoD become unavailable on the most popular console
|
| It would still be available for at least 10 years even if the
| deal went through.
| mysterydip wrote:
| If Microsoft and Activision are both US companies, but have
| international offices, do they have to get approval from every
| country they operate in? Could they merge just the US parts or
| non-UK parts?
| rwmj wrote:
| Yes actually. When IBM acquired Red Hat there was some last-
| minute hijinx involving getting Brazilian (IIRC) regulatory
| approval.
| capableweb wrote:
| Yes, both companies have offices around the globe, with
| corporate entities all over the place. As those have to operate
| within the laws of the countries they're incorporated in, if
| they get blocked by some local watchdog, the acquisition
| wouldn't be able to be completed in that country.
|
| More so, the merger is also discussed in the EU in general,
| which is a bigger market than just the UK alone, and if the
| acquisition gets blocked in the UK, EU watchdog will surely use
| that block as prior material for doing a EU-wide block.
|
| Hence Microsoft is lobbying both the UK itself and Europe wide
| for making the acquisition go through.
|
| Of course, even if the acquisition gets blocked everywhere but
| in the US, the US counter-part can still be acquired, but not
| sure how much sense that would make, they'll probably end up
| not going through with it at all in that case.
| Firmwarrior wrote:
| If the US part has all the talent and all the profit, seems
| like that'd still be a pretty viable move, wouldn't it?
| capableweb wrote:
| I don't think the US has all of neither, but especially not
| revenue. Asia tends to be the biggest market, with the US
| being the second and EU third. Usually, US has maybe half
| of the profits as the Asia counterpart, while EU has half
| of that.
|
| So if the acquisition gets blocked in the EU, they'll miss
| out on a ton of revenue, for sure.
|
| Not to mention the operational overhead of actually
| operating the machinery when the machinery is banned in the
| EU but not the US.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| > Usually, US has maybe half of the profits as the Asia
| counterpart, while EU has half of that.
|
| But is this actually the case with Activision? Aren't
| most of their games banned in China (this shrinking the
| Asian audience massively) and don't they charge a lot
| less?
| bastardoperator wrote:
| You can see that games in other highly populated regions
| sell for much less. This is the 7th most popular game on
| steam that isn't free to play.
|
| https://steamdb.info/app/252490/
|
| 39.99 in the US, 22-23 dollars in China and India. In
| indonesia the game sold for as little as 13 cents a
| license. It is slightly higher in the EU and UK but by
| very little. In this case 24% of all players are
| American. The UK is 2%. So even with a slightly higher
| price, they're not getting anywhere close to the revenue
| that US consumers are generating. Russia has 10% of the
| player population and the game sells for 13 dollars. I
| don't think the population correlates to revenue when the
| game in nearly every market is going to see for less, or
| attract much less players.
| capableweb wrote:
| According to sources gathered by Statista, Asia Pacific
| is the largest market for gaming:
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/539572/games-market-
| reve...
|
| (in billion U.S. dollars)
|
| - Asia Pacific - 87.9
|
| - North America - 48.4
|
| - Europe - 32.9
|
| - Latin America - 8.4
|
| - Middle East & Africa - 6.8
| nonethewiser wrote:
| That's not the question. The question is what share of
| revenue it is for Activision.
|
| Edit: found the numbers here
| https://investor.activision.com/news-releases/news-
| release-d...
|
| Americas: 1,211
|
| Europe and Middle East: 742
|
| Asia Pacific: 381
|
| Total: 2,334
|
| So Asia is 16%.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| One would think the US part owns all of the IPs as well.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Seems like the main thing of value at this point. It
| would be great to get rid of the toxic bureaucracy
| milking the IP.
| fckthisguy wrote:
| Why would the US part ha e all of the talent? Are/were
| Activision's development teams based solely in the US? I
| thought they had devs elsewhere too.
|
| Might make sense if their EU/UK offices were mostly admin.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Some of Microsoft's top game development studios,
| specifically right now, Rare and Playground Games are based
| in the UK and contribute at least some of the profit and
| arguably a lot of talent.
|
| (Microsoft has a really interesting history of UK game
| development teams, going way back, including ones they
| ultimately shut down such as Lionhead.)
| justeleblanc wrote:
| https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6448f377814c6...
|
| > Why did we review this merger?
|
| > 28. The CMA's primary duty is to seek to promote competition
| for the benefit of consumers. It has a duty to investigate
| mergers that could raise competition concerns in the UK,
| provided it has jurisdiction to do so.
|
| > 29. Microsoft announced in January 2022 that it had agreed to
| acquire Activision for a purchase price of USD 68.7 billion.
| The Merger was conditional on receiving merger control
| clearance from several global competition agencies, including
| the CMA.
|
| > 30. While both Microsoft and Activision are US-based
| entities, the question for the CMA is whether the Merger may
| have an impact on competition in the UK. This link to the UK
| can be established based on the turnover of the business being
| acquired in the UK (ie whether the UK turnover of that business
| is more than PS70 million). In this case, we concluded that the
| CMA had jurisdiction to review this Merger because Activision
| met that threshold in FY2021.
|
| You can read the full case here: https://www.gov.uk/cma-
| cases/microsoft-slash-activision-bliz... Microsoft and
| Activision/Blizzard decided themselves to seek the approval of
| the CMA.
|
| The CMA's final decision is a 418 pages-long report. I doubt
| any of the commenters here have read it before throwing in
| their opinion about the case or the decision.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| You don't have to read 418 pages to have an opinion.
| newsclues wrote:
| As a gamer Activision is a shitty big company and while Microsoft
| is in the same category, Microsoft is an improvement over
| Activision.
| kats wrote:
| At least they fired all those people for sexual harassment. 37
| fired and 40 written up. Goes to you can really change a bad
| workplace culture, it just takes 69 billion dollars.
| pipes wrote:
| How can the UK prevent two US companies from merging?
| sofixa wrote:
| Welcome to globalisation, baby. Very few companies are in one
| country exclusively, and are thus subject to the laws of _any_
| country they operate in. That 's why Google pulled out of China
| years ago, to not be subject to Chinese laws (even though
| they're a "US" company).
|
| For reference, both Activision Blizzard and Microsoft have very
| significant presence outside of the US.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| Not a lawyer (barrister?) but I'd guess it's because both
| Microsoft and Activision have offices/legal entities in the UK
| as well as the US. I wonder if the decision could be routed by
| Activision simply closing those offices and exiting the UK? Not
| saying it should be routed, just openly speculating as an
| armchair not-lawyer/barrister.
| kmlx wrote:
| it's not about offices, it's about competition.
|
| if the companies' activities affect competition in the UK
| then the CMA is responsible.
|
| the hint is in the name: Competition and Markets Authority
| nonethewiser wrote:
| That's not really the question. I could claim authority of
| you and your family. But what is the mechanism that
| enforces it? Why would you recognize that?
|
| Why would Microsoft listen or care about the ruling? It's
| because they operate in the UK. The CMA can't just regulate
| companies that don't operate in the UK.
| dopeboy wrote:
| I was wondering this too. Does this also affect whether they
| can do business there?
| GalenErso wrote:
| IANAL, but why would it be within the UK's authority to block a
| merger between two US-based entities? Could, I don't know, Angola
| or India block similar mergers? Does every country have to
| approve, or at least not disapprove?
| skrebbel wrote:
| I think the logic is that they can't stop the merger, but they
| can stop the resulting company from doing business in the UK.
| Angola can do the same but possibly the resulting company will
| just -\\_(tsu)_/- and move on. And possibly not so much with
| India or the UK, which are much bigger markets for these
| companies.
| GalenErso wrote:
| Given Microsoft's and Activision's respective dominance in
| their markets, Microsoft could ignore the regulators and keep
| doing business in the country.
|
| The British economy cannot work without Windows PCs, the
| Office suite, and Azure and OneDrive. And banning Microsoft
| and Activision's games would piss off half of the under 30
| crowd, and by proxy, their parents. It would also be
| unprecedented for any country to do that.
| pmontra wrote:
| > The British economy cannot work without Windows PCs, the
| Office suite, and Azure and OneDrive.
|
| It would be a pain but they and everybody else would find
| ways to cope with that.
| tzs wrote:
| I work for a non-UK company that has some online
| customers in the UK and in the EU. We have to collect
| each country's VAT on those sales.
|
| Before Brexit we used the VAT MOSS system, which allows
| non-EU companies to register in a single country, collect
| the appropriate VAT on EU sales, then quarterly send the
| total VAT collected and a form showing total sales for
| each country to that single country's tax folks, and that
| country deals with distributing the VAT to the separate
| countries.
|
| Post Brexit vote we continued to use VAT MOSS (which has
| since been renamed to something else that I'm failing to
| remember) although we switched our registration from the
| UK to Ireland [1] just in case the UK did something
| stupid and failed to negotiate a Brexit deal in which
| they remained part of the VAT MOSS system.
|
| They in fact did fail to remain in the VAT MOSS system,
| and so we had to register with the UK for VAT. They told
| is that the tax office was a bit busy dealing with Brexit
| so it might take a while to actually issue our VAT
| registration number, which we need in order to actually
| pay collected VAT to them. They said that until then we
| should collect VAT, but not call it VAT, and hold on to
| it.
|
| That was _over 4 years ago_ and we are still waiting.
|
| A country that for 4 years and counting has to tell
| businesses to _not_ remit collected taxes because that
| country cannot manage to issue the registration numbers
| that would allow those businesses to file their tax
| reports is not a country that instills confidence that
| they could handle something that is actually hard like
| switching OS /office suite/cloud.
|
| [1] In retrospect, we should have used Ireland from the
| start. Getting registered in the first place for VAT MOSS
| in the UK had involved a lot of paperwork and time, and
| the quarterly filings required submitting separate
| spreadsheets for the UK and the rest of the EU.
|
| Ireland registration took a few minutes online. To file
| we just copy/paste the data from our quarterly VAT report
| script into a text box on a web form and submit it.
| spookie wrote:
| I find your argument to be exactly the reason why these
| acquisitions should be blocked.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| > The British economy cannot work without Windows PCs
|
| If that is genuinely true, then the British economy has a
| BIG problem that it needs to resolve. Alongside all the
| others, of course.
| georgyo wrote:
| You make it sound like any government should be able to
| cut ties with any company at a whim.
|
| Microsoft and Apple dominate the desktop market, with
| Microsoft in a commanding lead.
|
| Imagine if the UK government said no one could buy SQL
| Server, use Excel, or buy new windows machines.
|
| People and companies would have to spend unimaginable
| amounts of time learning and migrating to alternative
| tools while at the same time angry at the government for
| telling them they can't use the tool of their choice.
|
| The same is true for Apple. If the UK government said
| Apple could no longer do business in the UK, the UK
| economy would be crushed.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| > You make it sound like any government should be able to
| cut ties with any company at a whim.
|
| Well, yes. An individual company should absolutely not be
| more powerful than an entire state. Yes, migrating away
| from Microsoft would be painful and expensive, but it
| _must_ be possible, otherwise Microsoft can get whatever
| it wants from the UK on pains of pulling its business.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| It's not just the UK. Munich famously tried to get away
| from Microsoft and failed. The reasons aren't entirely
| clear to me - rumor has it it's because of some deals
| behind closed doors - but I think it's obvious that many
| governments on all levels are fully dependent on
| Microsoft. I believe China is headed towards independence
| of Microsoft, though.
| paganel wrote:
| > The British economy cannot work without Windows PCs, the
| Office suite, and Azure and OneDrive
|
| I would expect that much of the British Government,
| including its armed/security forces, rely on those MS
| products and services. As such, I think that telling a big
| major US ally "tough luck, you're on your own right now" in
| the middle of this very tense global political climate is
| not in the best interests of Microsoft the US company.
| qwytw wrote:
| I guess they could just impose huge fines instead of
| banning MS products outright.
| GalenErso wrote:
| Sure, but if the fine is non trivial, Microsoft could
| file a lawsuit. It would also be a bad look for Britain
| to effectively extortionate foreign firms to keep doing
| business in the country. Whether it's called a "legally
| approved levy under xyz law" or a bribe to the government
| is beyond the point. It's the kind of thing you see in
| corrupt third world countries.
| klelatti wrote:
| Sorry file a lawsuit on what grounds?
|
| You seem to be under the impression that large firms can
| just ignore the laws of the countries they do business
| in. That's not how it works.
| ben_w wrote:
| > The British economy cannot work without Windows PCs, the
| Office suite, and Azure and OneDrive.
|
| You're not wrong, but that's _almost_ not a sufficient
| consideration for the British administration in recent
| years.
| Mindwipe wrote:
| And the UK would fine them in excess of any profit
| generated, and there is the potential for senior MS
| executives to go to prison, and even possible extradition.
|
| There is absolutely no prospect of Microsoft deciding to
| try and do that. Nil. None.
| GalenErso wrote:
| Because the UK is going to impose extortionary penalties
| on one of the largest corporations of its no. 1
| geopolitical ally at a time when it needs the US more
| than ever (trade, AUKUS, Ukraine/NATO, F-35s, etc.) and
| jail their execs. Rishi Sunak would never allow that to
| happen.
| tolien wrote:
| > a time when it needs the US more than ever (trade,
| AUKUS, Ukraine/NATO, F-35s, etc.)
|
| Putting aside that there's technology from UK companies
| in the F-35 (Rolls contributed to the lift fan in the B
| model, Martin-Baker ejection seats etc), the US needs
| AUKUS (as a bulwark to China) and the UK's contribution
| to NATO (cf AUKUS and add Russia to the mix) more than
| the UK does, especially in a post-Brexit world where the
| UK's influence is significantly diminished.
|
| The EU are also still looking at the deal, with the
| potential of imposing licensing requirements [1].
|
| 1: https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/eu-unlikely-
| demand-ass...
| ThisIsNotNew wrote:
| The US certainly needs UK help on Diego Garcia, which the
| UK is negotiating to hand over back to Mauritius.
| gbear605 wrote:
| The US government is also suing to prevent the deal. They
| would support the penalties.
| epolanski wrote:
| > Microsoft could ignore the regulators and keep doing
| business in the country
|
| No it can't. You are immediately cutoff from payment and
| transaction systems and you have no legal basis for selling
| anything in the country.
|
| On top of that, there's the obvious factor of being it very
| simple to completely block you online.
|
| Another example, you may not be aware of it, but many
| companies can't do business in Europe or European
| countries. E.g. several US media outlets don't want to
| comply with European privacy laws.
|
| If they can't do business in a country they can't, simple
| as that.
|
| Even the rest of your comment is even more ridiculous.
|
| A company trying to force its hand against legislation like
| that is a business-harakiri. You can't possibly think such
| stuff isn't looked upon by other business actors and
| governments.
| Zurrrrr wrote:
| [dead]
| diffeomorphism wrote:
| > Microsoft could ignore the regulators and keep doing
| business in the country.
|
| Openly breaking the law sounds like a great plan. Do you
| have a podcast with other great tips like this? E.g. "just
| don't pay taxes" or "you can steal stuff when nobody is
| looking".
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| Taxes, no. But some examples are Uber (vs. taxi
| regulations), and marijuana stores in the U.S.
| acallaghan wrote:
| It would allow them to operate but issue heavy financial
| sanctions and penalties, rather than just disallow them at
| first -
|
| These financial sanctions could swallow up any and all
| profit from the UK market
| ornitorrincos wrote:
| When companies are so big that operate in multitude of markets,
| yes, and depending on how many and the size of those
| disapproving the merger gets cancelled or parts of the business
| split, accommodations for those disapproving and so on.
|
| Which is why such mergers take a long time.
|
| Now, being both based in the US, the US could say no and it
| would not happen and no need for any other regulator to
| consider the merger.
| johneth wrote:
| Microsoft and Activision both have assets in the UK, both sell
| products and services in the UK, and so the UK has a right to
| regulate their activity in the UK market.
|
| Similar situation to other jurisdictions (EU, China, India,
| etc.)
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| So the UK cannot stop the takeover, but it can -- of course
| -- block Microsoft from carrying out any business in the UK
| -- and that's, effectively, what's happening here?
| ricardobayes wrote:
| I cannot foresee anything good coming out of this, when a
| country and a large corporation starts to play chicken with
| each other.
| ginko wrote:
| When a country and a large corporation start playing
| chicken with each other then the country wins.
| Veen wrote:
| Microsoft is a large corporation, but the UK is the 6th
| biggest economic entity in the world. Microsoft is not
| even close to the economic and legal power of a country
| the UK's size. And if the EU acts in the same way, as
| seems likely, there is absolutely nothing Microsoft can
| do about it.
| nashashmi wrote:
| Activision UK cannot be part of the purchase deal. This
| lowers the valuation. And stops activision from going along
| with the merger in the other countries.
| sleepychu wrote:
| Is this realistic? The government is heavily reliant on
| Windows as is much of their economy. It's hard to imagine
| them evicting Microsoft from the market.
| spookie wrote:
| Given time and effort it's possible. If such a move were
| to be done I'm sure every democratic country would be
| most displeased. Which would in turn, warrant them all
| the will in the world to completly reform their
| dependencies on Microsoft.
|
| I don't see any reason as to why this couldn't happen,
| the EU has already demonstrated its concerns on relying
| too much in certain companies, and they don't have as
| much of a flagrant issue as the aforementioned agressive
| move would imply.
| jalev wrote:
| It's not all or nothing. Microsoft will not be able to
| sell _gaming_ services in the UK. The other things will
| be fine.
| johneth wrote:
| Pretty much.
|
| Microsoft and Activision do both have various subsidiaries
| in the UK, too.
| Mindwipe wrote:
| They can block the companies from trading in that country
| ultimately if the merger happens.
|
| Could Microsoft Activision in theory pull out of the entire UK
| market and still merge (not just gaming, stop selling Office in
| the UK for example)? Yes. Will they? Absolutely not. There are
| significant chunks of Microsoft shareholders who don't want to
| do this deal in the first place and they certainly aren't going
| to torch the profitable bits of Microsoft for the gaming
| division, which has terrible financial performance.
| rsynnott wrote:
| In practice, if you're a multinational, doing a big merger,
| you'll want approval from authorities in at least the US and
| EU, probably UK (their regulators tend to behave similarly to
| the EU ones anyway) and maybe China if you do business there.
|
| Strictly speaking, _none_ of the regulators can individually
| stop a merger (even if it's the home country regulator, the
| multinational can just redomicile) but in practice they all
| have a veto, because the multinational wants to be allowed do
| business everywhere.
| shudza wrote:
| How come the UK is the one that blocks this? Aren't those US
| based companies?
| NicuCalcea wrote:
| With British employees and customers.
| ecf wrote:
| I'd love to see the deal going through anyway and Microsoft
| pulling COD out of Britain. Just once I want to see this
| bluff get called.
| klelatti wrote:
| From the FT:
|
| Activision, maker of the hit game Call of Duty, said the ruling
| "contradicts the ambitions of the UK to become an attractive
| country to build technology businesses". It labelled the decision
| a "disservice to UK citizens, who face increasingly dire economic
| prospects", adding: "the UK is clearly closed for business."
|
| What a petulant response.
| reedf1 wrote:
| It is petulant - but it is also politically savvy. This is
| exactly the kind of rhetoric the UK government tries very hard
| to dispel.
| klelatti wrote:
| You can make these points without insulting the country. He's
| not winning any friends with language like this.
| sam345 wrote:
| This strikes me as trying to mandate a particular market
| structure while at the same time claiming free market
| motivations. At what point will big tech structure themselves in
| such a way as to avoid certain over-regulated regimes.
| Vt71fcAqt7 wrote:
| In general I agree that Big Tech is too big or is in some way
| anticompetitive; In this case however there is no threat in my
| opinion. Video games are not a utility and have no control over
| utilities unlike eg. Amazon (where we can debate what control
| Amazon has). That to me is the most important factor. Besides
| that point, there is no inherent anticompetitive element to one
| company owning a large portion of the video game market because
| it does not prevent others from competing. Anyone can make their
| own game, and indie games succeed year after year, even if 99%
| fail.
|
| The real issue is tying computers to software. Computers and
| software need to be considered two markets. Computers _are_ a
| utility, whereas software is _sometimes_ a utility. But by tying
| software and computers, these tying companies use their software
| to be anticompetitive in the hardware market. That is, any
| software which does not run on an untied hardware system is
| anticompetitive even if it has procompetitive effects. All this
| is to say that we need the Open App Markets Act to pass.
|
| (This is all ignoring the OS market and the hardware and software
| tying that exists in it, which is more difficult to discus, but
| in my opinion system calls are anticompetitive as well by nature
| with the exception of a theoretical standardized set of system
| calls.)
| geuis wrote:
| > Video games are not a utility and have no control over
| utilities
|
| This is true, but the laws around this don't only apply to
| utilities. In fact, they don't fully apply there at all (but
| I'll circle back to that).
|
| As a big example, look at movie production companies and
| theater chains. Way back when, lots of the most popular chains
| were owned by production companies. So if you wanted to see
| certain movies, they were only available at the theaters owned
| by the companies that produced the film.
|
| Sounds a lot like what we've seen in video games for years now,
| where lots of AAA games are exclusive on Xbox, Playstation,
| Nintendo (biggest example), or PC. And let's not forget MacOS
| and even Linux. Pretty much only the roughly equivalent spread
| of so many platforms has forced the big publishers to largely
| do multi-platform releases of popular titles. Let Microsoft own
| Activision-Blizzard and we could be seeing lots of existing
| titles and new ones be PC and Xbox only.
|
| In regards to the big utilities, the last major one of those to
| be broken up was AT&T in the 80's. But beyond that, most of the
| major utilities can't really be "broken up" because of what
| they do. Power generation, water, and sewage. Those all require
| shared public infrastructure for the most part. Because of
| that, small pure commercial enterprises aren't possible. But
| for the most part the companies that provide those services
| _are_ still commercial entities, but they have a few extra
| layers of government oversight that notionally should be
| monitoring them for good governance and civic oversight. Sadly
| we see where that falls apart like in Flint, MI.
|
| Only didn't mention trash/recycling pickup because that's a lot
| more flexible. Much easier to have competing services, although
| in places like SF we only have Recology.
| jimmydorry wrote:
| Anti-competition bodies are designed to regulate more than just
| utilities.
|
| Are you really saying that Microsoft can't exert undue
| influence on all other games and software studios to unfairly
| compete in the gaming segment... even though they would be
| controlling the operating system developed on and targetted
| to... let alone their extensive cloud and console providings
| that they could simply deny to the competition?
|
| In such a landscape, indie devs would be powerless.
| Vt71fcAqt7 wrote:
| >Anti-competition bodies are designed to regulate more than
| just utilities.
|
| I was looking for a better word than "utility" but couldn't
| think of one. What I mean is that games are unimportant.
| Grain is a "utility" for me as are computers ect. And I don't
| think it matters what Anti-competition bodies are "designed"
| to regulated as I am already giving my own opinion on what I
| think they should do so for me this isn't a such an important
| point.
|
| >even though they would be controlling the operating system
| developed on and targetted to...
|
| _That_ is the issue exactly, which was my whole point. It 's
| an issue irrespective of whether they have 1% or 99% of the
| video game market. They are the hardware/syscall railraod by
| which developers ship their software oil. But large
| marketshare alone is not an issue, and can be _assured_ to be
| a non issue with something like the Open App Markets Act
| whereas in something like grain or computers it is almost
| impossible to show whether a dominant company has used their
| monopoly to hurt competition. If we just give some basic
| rules as to allowing users to decide how to use their
| computers we won 't need to care about how large any video
| game company is.
| pers0n wrote:
| I wish the US had the guts to do things like this, but I suppose
| they don't due to lobbying.
| kmlx wrote:
| https://www.eurogamer.net/ftc-suing-to-block-microsofts-69bn...
|
| > FTC suing to block Microsoft's $69bn Activision Blizzard
| acquisition
| HumanReadable wrote:
| Very sad about this decision. Blizzard has shown itself to be
| entirely incompetent, and seeing how well Microsoft managed the
| Minecraft IP I was looking forward to seeing what they could have
| done with the excellent blizzard IP.
| segasaturn wrote:
| Minecraft is a great example of what could have been, for sure.
| We're nearing the 10 year anniversary of the Mojang acquisition
| (wow) and Minecraft is still flourishing and as popular as it's
| ever been. It's kind of amazing how relevant Minecraft has
| remained all of these years instead of fading into the
| background as a 2010s fad game. It's also stayed aggressively
| cross platform, available on basically every device known to
| man, including a Linux port that's still developed, which
| throws a bit of water on the fears that Microsoft would turn
| Call of Duty exclusive.
| edgyquant wrote:
| > which throws a bit of water on the fears that Microsoft
| would turn Call of Duty exclusive.
|
| No it doesn't since Microsoft is doing just that with
| Bethesda. The Minecraft acquisition was at a time when MS had
| no good will and needed to earn some, plus it's a lot of
| children playing that who can't be bullied into buying
| another platform. This is not the case with future releases
| on games that basically every adult who plays games takes
| part in.
| mturilin wrote:
| Can someone explain how a UK regulator can block a deal between
| two US companies?
| can16358p wrote:
| They also operate in UK. Of course if they were "just" two US
| companies UK can't do anything but these companies also have
| legal presence in the UK.
| Leherenn wrote:
| What would they have to do if they were to decide that the
| deal is more important than the UK?
|
| - merge everywhere else but the UK (presumably that would
| mean spinning off/closing one of Microsoft or Activision UK
| branch). I guess that wouldn't be enough?
|
| - both companies have to pull off of the UK?
| [deleted]
| AraceliHarker wrote:
| I can't understand at all why CMA accepts the overwhelming share
| of the current PS5 high-end game console market for the reason of
| cloud gaming, which has hardly started up yet, and even if they
| say "protect the innovation and choice of cloud gaming", gamers
| who only have Xbox Series S|X think "if you say that, let me play
| Collapse: Star Rail or FF16 on Xbox", don't they?
| justinclift wrote:
| This is good news. :)
| tallanvor wrote:
| It isn't, though, when they haven't been blocking Sony from
| making significant purchases.
| jeppester wrote:
| Thats because Sony's most significant purchase (Bungie) is
| completely insignificant compared to ActiBlizz. It is also
| much smaller than Bethesda, which MS acquired without much
| scrutiny, and before the Bungie deal.
|
| When you look at the numbers there is just no way to make the
| conclusion that Sony are "just as bad" when it come to
| aquisitions.
|
| I am however absolutely in favor of Sony getting blocked,
| should they for instance plan to acquire EA, Ubisoft,
| Rockstar etc.
| justinclift wrote:
| Well, 1/2 is better than 0/2. At least in this context.
|
| Maybe they'll get Sony sorted out too at some point.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| What significant purchases has Sony done though in the gaming
| space? IIRC it was mostly smaller game development studios,
| not the (until quite recently at least) largest game
| publisher in the world.
| tallanvor wrote:
| Bungie was a $3.7b acquisition, which I wouldn't consider
| to be small by any means.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Orders of magnitude smaller, but I don't think Sony
| should be buying game studios also.
| ErneX wrote:
| 69 vs 3.7? plus the difference on the amount of IP is
| huge, not in the same league
| spookie wrote:
| I understand your concerns in the video game industry
| landscape, even though I may add that Microsoft may just have
| been buying out many more studios in recent years.
|
| However, I don't believe that tto be the bigger issue. Let's
| look at this from a bigger perspective: Microsoft is much
| bigger than Sony. The western world is very much dependent on
| this giant. Should it have even more power?
| bluescrn wrote:
| Is it?
|
| Putting MS in charge might have saved Blizzard from Activision.
| Maybe they'd have brought WoW to Xbox, or done something new
| with the Starcraft IP. Perhaps even a new Blizzard MMO...
| Reason077 wrote:
| Activision selling _Blizzard_ to Microsoft would be a deal I
| could get behind!
|
| On the other hand, as a Mac gamer, maybe it wouldn't be so
| great? Blizzard have been great at Mac support, with all
| their titles - except Overwatch - being available on Mac
| since day 1. But Microsoft hardly releases anything for Mac
| now days.
| istor wrote:
| Diablo 4 won't be released on Mac either. I feel the days
| of Blizzard being a champion for Mac gaming have ended.
| They will continue to support it in WoW and the other
| legacy titles they continue to update.
|
| I'd be surprised, merger or not, if they ever release any
| of their new AAA titles on Mac again.
| bluescrn wrote:
| There's not many Macs with suitable GPUs for higher-end
| gaming, are there?
|
| And between the move to Metal as a graphics API and the
| transition away from Intel CPUs, porting PC games to Mac
| seems like it'd be rather more of a pain these days.
| Reason077 wrote:
| Arguably, all modern Macs (with M1 and M2 chips) have
| GPUs suitable for reasonably high-end gaming. These have
| the same GPUs used in high-end iPhones and iPads, but
| with more cores, more RAM, and more memory bandwidth.
|
| Some of Blizzard's titles (World of Warcraft,
| Hearthstone) were already ported to be M1-native. But
| even the older titles that haven't been ported (StarCraft
| 2, Heroes of the Storm, etc) run great despite being
| emulated. In fact, they run much faster and smoother on
| my M1 Mac than they ever did on my Intel Macs!!
|
| You're right, though, that Apple's attachment to Metal
| and lack of built-in support for industry standard APIs
| like Vulkan is an issue (although a 3rd-party Vulkan
| implementation is available).
| officeplant wrote:
| I can play Subnautica, Prodeus, Total Warhammer III, WoW,
| Metro Exodus, etc. Various settings all at 1080p on the
| monitor I have connected externally.
|
| And that's on a base M1 macbook Air with the 7C GPU
| setup. Although it does have a fan rigged up underneath
| my laptop stand. Every other Apple Silicon Mac has even
| more gpu oomph.
|
| Friends with M1/M2 Pro machines are plenty happy with
| their GPU performance but most of them all just play WoW.
| One with a M1 Max Studio is enjoying plenty of
| performance at 4K.
| Reason077 wrote:
| There's also a simple mod you can do to the MacBook Air
| (installing a thermal pad on the SoC) which significantly
| improves heat dissipation - check YouTube.
|
| I have a similar setup (except 8 core) and with the mod I
| don't feel any need for an external fan for gaming.
| officeplant wrote:
| Yeah I was tempted to do it to make my fan cooling work
| even better, but I want to be able to resell this Air
| soon. It's being replaced with a M2 Mini with 24GB of
| RAM. Finally tired of the 8GB life.
| hinkley wrote:
| Blizzard was never really about the high end. Couldn't
| have had 10 million active subscriptions on an MMO if
| they did.
| hinkley wrote:
| Fuck, even Torchlight is going PC only. Still don't know
| why Apple had to steer away from OpenGL.
| Reason077 wrote:
| It's weird how most small indy titles/studios on Steam
| seem to support Mac just fine but it's the big guys that
| seem (increasingly?) reluctant to do so!
|
| Perhaps because small studios start with ready-made game
| engines that are already ported to Metal?
| bluescrn wrote:
| Yes, if you're using Unity and primarily developing on
| Windows, most things will 'just work' on Mac. But if
| you're a big studio with an in-house engine and toolset,
| supporting a new platform and additional graphics API can
| be a whole lot of work.
| hinkley wrote:
| People developing their own frameworks make a lot of
| simplifying assumptions that turn out not to be true, and
| then it makes it very difficult to walk them back later.
| Often people get defensive and try to argue that this is
| a feature.
|
| Leaving out your deep pocketed customers seems like a
| pretty dumb move to me.
| pbalcer wrote:
| But would have prevented many players from actually enjoying
| Blizzard games. Personally, I am not interested in purchasing
| an Xbox or installing Windows on my PC, even if the merger is
| finalized.
| francislavoie wrote:
| That's not true, they've committed to continuing to release
| on other platforms.
| bluescrn wrote:
| Platform-exclusive titles have been around for as long as
| games consoles, that's not going to change.
|
| It's annoying that so many great Nintendo games are only
| available for Switch, and I can't run them at 4k/60fps+ on
| PC or higher-end console. But that's just how things are.
| And at the end of they day, they're unimportant
| entertainment products, we're not talking about
| monopolies/oligopolies controlling something important.
| Adverblessly wrote:
| > It's annoying that so many great Nintendo games are
| only available for Switch, and I can't run them at
| 4k/60fps+ on PC or higher-end console.
|
| You technically can via emulation, though how legal that
| is depends on the laws where you are I guess.
| samwillis wrote:
| Other thread and link to the government release here:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35711913
|
| https://www.gov.uk/government/news/microsoft-activision-deal...
| kkan wrote:
| Anybody who plays games is not happy about this. Activision is
| the worst of the worst and the Microsoft deal was a chance to
| make their offering more refined and accessible via GamePass.
| Especially it was about saving Blizzard from turning into total
| shitshow. Id this deal will not go through, nothing will change.
| CoD will remain trash, Diablo IV will have micro-transactions in
| addition to its $70 price tag.
| segasaturn wrote:
| Unfortunately Microsoft's overall size causes people to have
| knee-jerk reactions about them being "too big" without looking
| into the context: Microsoft is in last place in console market
| share this gen and the previous gen. In the gaming space
| Microsoft isn't a monopoly, they _are_ the underdog that
| antitrust is supposed to product.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Maybe Microsoft should make a better console if they want a
| higher place in the console market, rather than just buy
| their way into ancillary markets.
| ErneX wrote:
| MS also puts micro-transactions on their 1st party titles, plus
| their 1st party titles have not been so great since the Xbox
| 360 days. Halo is a shade of what it was for example.
| diffeomorphism wrote:
| Anybody who plays games is very happy about this. Activision is
| the worst of the worst and the Microsoft deal was a chance to
| cement this problem or make it even worse.
| segasaturn wrote:
| Per the agreement in the deal, when the deal closed Bobby
| Kotick would be out as CEO and replaced with Phil Spencer who
| is VERY well respected in the gaming community.
| stale2002 wrote:
| You actually have to make an argument, which you didn't.
|
| The argument for why Microsoft would make things better is
| that we can look how great Microsoft has been handling
| similar gaming acquisitions, like Minecraft.
|
| Your "argument" though seems to be repeat back someone else
| statement while saying "Nuh uhh!".
|
| Do have an actual original thought here, as for _why_ you
| think Microsoft would make things worse, when the evidence we
| have shows otherwise?
|
| Or is the extent of your argument "Nuh Uhh!" And "I said the
| opposite of what you just said!"
| pcurve wrote:
| Microsoft has done ok with not bastardizing its acquisitions
| under the current CEO, no?
| newsclues wrote:
| No, unhappy about this.
|
| As you say, Activision is the worst of the worst and the MS
| deal was a chance to change this.
|
| You think Activision is going to ditch the terrible
| leadership and change on its own? haha
| sensanaty wrote:
| You really think M$ wouldn't stick microtransactions out the
| ass out of anything they touch coming from ActiBlizzard?
| segasaturn wrote:
| I know a lot of people here are anti-big tech and I am too, to a
| certain extent, but I want to play devil's advocate here and
| provide my case for the deal:
|
| Activision-Blizzard was in total corporate chaos before the deal
| was announced, the CEO (Bobby Kotick) was accused of permitting
| workplace sexual harassment and employees at the company were on
| the verge of mutiny. They were also seen as a stagnant publisher
| that only cared about its billion dollar franchises (Call of Duty
| and Candy Crush) while letting its other IPs like StarCraft and
| World of Warcraft rot and turning the beloved Diablo into a cash-
| grab pay-to-win mobile game. The Microsoft acquisition would have
| likely breathed some new life into the company and allowed
| corporate to clean up shop. This will probably lead to
| Activision-Blizzard continuing on its previous, doomed trajectory
| that it was on back in 2021.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Right, the merge would have been good for activision and
| microsoft, but bad for the consumer.
| spprashant wrote:
| As far as devil's advocate argument goes I suppose its valid.
|
| But I wouldn't think this changes the opinion on any antitrust
| violation concerns.
|
| If a company has problems, especially cultural issues, it
| should fix them or die.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| > The Microsoft acquisition would have likely breathed some new
| life into the company and allowed corporate to clean up shop.
|
| This is irrelevant to the committee's decision. The question is
| if the merger is too anti competitive.
| capableweb wrote:
| If you wanna play devil's advocate, at least try to answer the
| concerns voiced by the watchdog.
|
| The concern is not who can develop the existing IPs the best or
| if Activision/Blizzard will continue to exist. The concern is
| that Microsoft already has a strong position, and consolidating
| it further will make it even harder than it is for new entrants
| to have any chance.
|
| > "Microsoft already enjoys a powerful position and head start
| over other competitors in cloud gaming and this deal would
| strengthen that advantage giving it the ability to undermine
| new and innovative competitors," Martin Coleman, chair of the
| independent panel of experts conducting this investigation,
| said.
|
| If you're still up for playing devil's advocate, come up with
| an argument against that this acquisition wouldn't consolidate
| anything in Microsoft's favor, and as a result lead to fewer
| consumer choices.
| segasaturn wrote:
| Microsoft is pretty consistently in last place in console
| market share and the Xbox brand is dwarfed by Sony and
| Tencent (China).
|
| Microsoft's strong current position in Cloud Gaming isn't
| because XCloud is devouring all the competition, its because
| the competition barely exists in the first place. Google and
| Amazon left their cloud gaming products to rot and GeForce
| now is very janky (but still quite popular from what I've
| heard!). Google and Amazon's mismanagement of their products
| doesn't automatically make XCloud into an aggressive anti-
| competitive monopoly, especially when you consider the fact
| that Microsoft inked a 10-year deal with Nintendo's cloud
| gaming provider to provide Call of Duty to the platform last
| month.
| capableweb wrote:
| You can read the summary yourself if you want, but it's
| 400+ pages, so might take a while. It's here: https://asset
| s.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/644939aa529ed...
|
| Key takeaways:
|
| > In relation to console gaming services, we found that
| Xbox (Microsoft) and PlayStation (Sony) compete closely
| with each other, and that Activision's Call of Duty (CoD)
| is important to the competitive offering of each. The
| evidence suggests, however, that Microsoft would not find
| it financially beneficial to make CoD exclusive to Xbox
| after the Merger. We also found that making CoD available
| on Xbox on better terms than on PlayStation would not
| materially harm PlayStation's ability to compete. On this
| basis, we found that the Merger would not substantially
| reduce competition in console gaming services in the UK.
|
| > In relation to cloud gaming services, we found that
| Microsoft already has a strong position. It owns a popular
| gaming platform (Xbox and a large portfolio of games), the
| leading PC operating system (Windows), and a global cloud
| computing infrastructure (Azure and Xbox Cloud Gaming),
| giving it important advantages in running a cloud gaming
| service. With an estimated 60-70% market share in global
| cloud gaming services, it is already much stronger than its
| rivals.
|
| > We found that the Merger would make Microsoft even
| stronger and substantially reduce competition in this
| market.
|
| According to the people who done this research (CMA), they
| seem to say MS already have a 60-70% marketshare, and
| making that higher via a acquisition, will make it harder
| for others to enter the market.
|
| CMA of course cannot make competition to step up, but they
| can try to stop incumbents from becoming monopolies, which
| is what's happening here.
| amrocha wrote:
| This is just my opinion obviously, but I don't think
| those advantages particularly matter for gaming.
|
| 1. Gamers don't want cloud gaming. Latency matters. Cloud
| gaming is at best an addon for when you can't use your
| console.
|
| 2. Xbox is the least popular gaming platform. If things
| keep going the way they are I would not be surprised if
| Microsoft got rid of Xbox before the next console cycle.
|
| 3. Windows being the leading operating system has no
| impact on the gaming industry
|
| This honestly reeks of an analysis done by outsiders that
| don't actually understand the industry. On the other
| hand, this consolidation also sucks to see.
| capableweb wrote:
| Again, CMA is not investigating what matters for gamers
| or not, but investing what market hold the entity has, if
| they are likely to abuse it and if the acquisition would
| make the market hold stronger.
|
| In the case of consoles, their own argument is that no,
| the market hold would not grow stronger.
|
| In the case of cloud gaming, their argument is that
| Microsoft already have a strong hold on the market (in
| the UK) and the acquisition would likely lead to a
| stronger hold.
|
| Xbox as a console and Windows as a OS and nothing to do
| with the case they're making.
|
| > This honestly reeks of an analysis done by outsiders
| that don't actually understand the industry. On the other
| hand, this consolidation also sucks to see.
|
| Yes, because they are not experts in the gaming industry,
| they are experts in the industry of businesses in
| general, and monopolies.
|
| Same could be said about your own argument, it reeks of
| an analysis done by someone who have no grasp on wider
| markets and monopolies, but happens to have knowledge
| about gaming to some degree.
| dmonitor wrote:
| I don't like this method of measuring a company's
| competitiveness with how popular they are with consumers.
| Just because MS can't cobble together a decent product that
| people enjoy doesn't mean that they should just be allowed
| to buy sectors of the market until they have a good
| majority. Maybe they are just releasing shit products
| despite having as many or more resources at their disposal
| compared to their competitors.
|
| Picture this feedback loop:
|
| - Microsoft has 20% market share
|
| - Microsoft buys company Y, bringing them up to 35%
|
| - Microsoft ruins company Y's product with their awful
| leadership
|
| - Microsoft now has 21% market share
| xzel wrote:
| As someone who was using GeForce during the pandemic it is
| a great service but janky is an understatement. There are a
| huge number of common "edge" cases I've run into: getting
| long passwords into games, passing mac keyboard commands to
| essentially windows buttons, etc. Still, it is AMAZING
| being able to play any game anywhere. But I'm not sure if
| the market for these products were/are big enough for so
| many players so pretty much everyone has dropped out.
| mehlmao wrote:
| Microsoft acquiring Bethesda fixed none of their management
| issues; why would this be any different? Further, Microsoft
| lied to EU regulators about what they'd do with the Zenimax /
| Bethesda acquisition.
| lofaszvanitt wrote:
| :DDDDDD
|
| The gaming landscape already looks like a barren desert. More
| consolidation will lead to more desert like features.
| newsclues wrote:
| Microsoft needs to clean up Activision-Blizzard, I totally
| agree.
|
| Two big bag companies, but surprising Microsoft is the better
| one.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| If the company is bad, then the company should fail.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > and turning the beloved Diablo into a cash-grab pay-to-win
| mobile game.
|
| A decision which has made them a metric shit-ton of money. Why
| would they stop when they've found a winning formula? And why
| would Microsoft decide to stop such an easy revenue stream?
| Sure the Diablo name is being dragged through the mud (among a
| particular demographic, at least) but the consequences for that
| are years or even decades away. If anything, "cleaning up shop"
| might mean shutting down the less profitable divisions -
| something Blizzard has been actively doing anyway.
|
| > This will probably lead to Activision-Blizzard continuing on
| its previous, doomed trajectory that it was on back in 2021.
|
| _Maybe_ their trajectory is doomed when measured in decades.
| Right now they 're printing cash. I think they're happy to
| abandon their legacy "core" audience in exchange for the gacha
| whales that will pay them multiples more for a cheaper-to-make
| experience.
|
| I realize that a lot of us grew up with Blizzard games, I
| myself have all the CE boxes they shipped since Warcraft III.
| But the people who made those experiences are generally long
| gone. A change of ownership is unlikely to radically change
| priorities or bring back the magic.
| maxsilver wrote:
| I agree with most of this, but this isn't an argument for
| Activision-Blizzard merging with Microsoft, this is an argument
| that Activision-Blizzard shareholders need to throw out Bobby
| Kotick and his folks, and replace them with competent
| leadership (or really, anyone with a pulse who won't union-bust
| and won't sexually harass people, would be more qualified at
| this point).
|
| It's ridiculous that a company with this many talented people,
| and this much treasured IP, is languishing in this state and
| tied up with such easy-to-avoid internal-only mistakes.
|
| > The Microsoft acquisition would have likely breathed some new
| life into the company and allowed corporate to clean up shop
|
| Maybe. But it seems more likely that Microsoft would have
| cleaned up leadership a _tiny bit_ and then left Activision-
| Blizzard to slowly quietly rot away, in much the same way that
| Microsoft has treated Halo.
| fireflash38 wrote:
| Agreed. But tossing leadership & getting new supposedly
| 'better' leadership is high risk, whereas an acquisition is
| low-risk and more reliable at getting short term gains.
|
| There's a substantial portion of the tech startup sphere
| whose entire goals are: get big enough to get acquired and
| get a big bag from the sale. It kind of runs counter to
| current sentiment around here.
| Salgat wrote:
| One is a solution that fixes the issue now, the other is us
| hoping for shareholders to eventually do the morally right
| thing (which is a silly thing to expect).
| ddtaylor wrote:
| Shareholders can get rid of Bobby Kotick and do all kinds of
| other leadership changes and it's not going to fix some of
| the problems that some of us were hopeful for.
|
| Microsoft has shown some resolve when it comes to supporting
| games in spaces that aren't absolute gold mines, specifically
| in the Real Time Strategy (RTS) genre. They are publishers of
| Age of Empires, which all things considered is a drop in the
| bucket when revenue wise, yet it still is allowed to exist.
| Blizzard (via Activision) mostly exploits or kills all of
| it's "less-than" products, which increasingly is almost
| everything when compared to the behemoths like Call of Duty
| and Candy Crush.
|
| It was probably a bit of wishful thinking, but some of us
| were actually excited that Microsoft would get access to some
| of the games that don't get supported very well while the
| customer base is literally holding their wallets out asking
| to pay to support the game. For example, Heroes of the Storm
| does have a dedicated following and we're ready to pay $10/mo
| or something similar to help support the game, but it's
| literally spent the last three years patching after every
| time it runs because it's broken. It still plays fine, but it
| eats gigabytes per month of bandwidth all because nobody
| cares enough to modify an XML file or something.
|
| The same is true of Diablo II: Resurrected. It's a great
| game, but we can't pay for extra stash tabs which in the ARPG
| genre is kind of the go-to monetization strategy these days.
| Everyone would be fine paying $5 for a few stash tabs and it
| would be a good way to support ongoing development and maybe
| pave the way to getting the long awaited "Act 6" content
| everyone would love or even just allow the team to spend a
| bit more time adding more end-game meta content.
| nashashmi wrote:
| > It's ridiculous that a company with this many talented
| people, and this much treasured IP, is languishing in this
| state and tied up with such easy-to-avoid internal-only
| mistakes.
|
| It's why they are languishing. It's the "resource curse". On
| the contrary, It's one of the reasons why Microsoft is a
| killer machine. They are disciplined and focused. That kind
| of discipline stifles away creativity (like Skype and
| yammer).
| ericmcer wrote:
| It is crazy how Blizzard was a few hundred employees when they
| released Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo over a couple years.
| Now with 50X as many employees and 23 years of effort they have
| done nothing but coast off their original hits.
|
| I don't know why this happens but it seems to occur again and
| again in gaming with indie studios that get acquired.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| When I consider that this turnaround seems to have happened
| right after they were acquired by Activision, it becomes less
| of a mystery. I suspect many of those original few hundred
| employees didn't stick around after their employer suddenly
| changed and those who left would have primarily been the most
| influential Blizzard people. There really is no "Blizzard"
| anymore except as it's tacked on to "Activision-".
| doikor wrote:
| Modern games are just way more complicated and all the assets
| have to be a lot higher quality. The assets especially just
| take a lot more work to do.
|
| A single character model can have more polygons then a whole
| game back in the day. The textures are also way more
| detailed, animations are more fluid/realistic, etc.
|
| This is why a lot of effort is being put into helping
| developers to make content faster with things like
| automatically generating large parts of levels/worlds
| (basically a developer puts in the important parts manually
| and some system fills in the rest) and automatically
| generating and animating humanoid models (MetaHuman), etc.
|
| For example here is nice video about using MetaHuman with
| basically just a phone for face capture as input
| https://youtu.be/pnaKyc3mQVk?t=72
|
| UE5 procedural generation stuff
| https://youtu.be/akIqVM0gh4w?t=435
| enraged_camel wrote:
| >> Modern games are just way more complicated and all the
| assets have to be a lot higher quality. The assets
| especially just take a lot more work to do.
|
| I mean... if this is the case, how did Vampire Survivors
| become a huge hit and win multiple game of the year awards,
| and result in countless clones?
| seventhtiger wrote:
| I call this "throwing cards in a hat phenomena".
|
| Even if we have brain-interface full immersion virtual
| reality, you can still have fun throwing cards into a
| hat. In fact you will prefer it.
|
| Games are like food rather than cars. In food, high
| quality food doesn't really push out low quality food.
| Even a billionaire will want a grilled cheese sandwich
| sometime. While in cars, you can say that in general
| people would like the more expensive cars rather than
| cheaper ones.
|
| To me this puts a hard limit on upside of quality for
| games. It doesn't matter how many thousands of hours of
| dialogue you have voiced and motion captured if a vampire
| survivors could always eat your lunch.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >Modern games are just way more complicated and all the
| assets have to be a lot higher quality.
|
| This is nonsense. Very few gamers actually care about how
| many polygons make up each tree and that some texture in
| the background is 10mb compressed. Meanwhile the actual
| product of video games from AAA companies has stagnated
| immensely. You can make your game ugly as sin, and if it's
| actually fun, people will love it. Every indie darling is
| an explicit disproving of this claim. We have Minecraft,
| factorio, cruelty squad which is entirely built around
| being horrible to look at but fun to play, an entire genre
| of "old" looking games that don't actually look old.
| There's even an entire world of games that look good with
| assets that you can buy on an open market for a few dollars
| each.
| J5892 wrote:
| You're not wrong. But if I'm paying $70 for a game, I'm
| definitely going to be annoyed if the trees look like
| they were pulled from Ocarina of Time.
| rightbyte wrote:
| I got a feeling developers nowadays are so much less
| efficient than 10-20 years ago.
|
| The tools are so bloated and arcane compared to the can-do
| approach.
|
| Also agile messes up productivity alot due to its inflexible
| and process heavy nature.
| ErneX wrote:
| Producing game assets of the quality expected nowadays
| takes a lot of time.
| danbolt wrote:
| I think that's a big element of this. The sort of quality
| bar we see in _StarCraft_ or _WarCraft III_ would come
| across as kit-bashing or stylized low-budget indie today.
| Shipping a AAA-style game in a timely fashion needs a
| larger production process than earlier works.
|
| The sort of issues around engineering and linked-lists[1]
| in the original _StarCraft_ wouldn 't really be an issue
| today. Teams are operating in a very different way.
|
| [1] https://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/tough-times-on-the-
| road-to-...
| rightbyte wrote:
| Ye that's true.
| mritchie712 wrote:
| * Success often brings bureaucracy to protect against losing
| what you've got going for you
|
| * The bureaucracy drives away the types of misfit maniacs
| that build incredible and unique products.
|
| * You're left with people more worried about fucking up then
| they are about building something awesome.
| beebmam wrote:
| How do you reconcile this belief with big tech companies
| being some of the largest bureaucracies on Earth, yet they
| continually build incredible and unique products?
| mritchie712 wrote:
| What big tech company built a unique product well after
| they were big?
|
| * Google is still mostly search
|
| * Amazon is still mostly an online store (small exception
| with AWS, but that was charcoal[0])
|
| * Meta is still mostly facebook (unique products were
| acquired)
|
| etc.
|
| 0 - https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-
| research/digita...
| SeanAnderson wrote:
| > Amazon is still mostly an online store (small exception
| with AWS, but that was charcoal[0])
|
| What? I would express the opposite of this sentiment.
| Amazon is mostly AWS. Their online store's profit pales
| in comparison to AWS.
|
| https://www.fool.com/investing/2022/07/07/aws-chief-says-
| ama...
|
| > Amazon overall generated $24.8 billion in operating
| profits in 2021, and AWS was responsible for $18.5
| billion (or 74%) of it. Basically, a business segment
| that contributes 14% of overall revenue is generating
| roughly three-quarters of Amazon's total operating
| profits.
| mritchie712 wrote:
| Right, I'm saying AWS is an outlier.
| cma wrote:
| Doesn't Amazon bucket their store ads (sponsored
| listings) under AWS?
| chippiewill wrote:
| Yeah, just take a look at Hearthstone.
|
| It was developed by a small independent team within
| Blizzard who iterated like crazy and created prototypes
| with Adobe Flash. At one point they transferred basically
| the entire team to work on finishing StarCraft 2
| temporarily and left the two principal game designers to
| continue iterating for 10 months.
|
| Hearthstone ended up being a smash hit and their first
| properly new game since they released World of Warcraft.
| All because they gave a small creative team the freedom to
| explore those ideas.
| misssocrates wrote:
| Was that proven? And how close did employees get to taking over
| the company?
| segasaturn wrote:
| Employees weren't staging a literal mutiny, I was using the
| term creatively.
|
| Here are some links about the worker unrest at ABK prior to
| acquisition announcement:
|
| Activision Blizzard worker organization: https://en.wikipedia
| .org/wiki/Activision_Blizzard_worker_org...
|
| Activision Blizzard employees stage open-ended strike and
| union drive:
| https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/12/activision-
| blizzard-w...
|
| Its noteworthy that the employee strikes mostly stopped after
| the acquisition was announced - seems they believed like I do
| that Microsoft would have cleaned things up.
| samstave wrote:
| The price of ~~content~~ games is too damn high!
|
| -
|
| Basically this, the cost for a AAA game at ~$69.99 is just
| fucking ridiculous.
| ErneX wrote:
| There were 70 USD games in the 90s. Yeah those were cartridge
| games but still, it's probably the sector were inflation has
| been felt the least.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| In the 90s I didn't have to give Rare $5 to play as oddjob,
| and another $5 to make heads big, and another $5 to fight
| slaps only, and another $5 to.....
|
| That's the difference. Those games were $70 because the ROM
| chips nintendo forced you to use were basically unavailable
| at sufficient quantities. Playstation games were cheaper
| despite being able to use literally 10x the amount of
| assets.
|
| The only people forcing AAA studios to add a billion
| polygons to every stick are themselves. They haven't tried
| anything different, so of course they think it's the only
| option. Meanwhile billions of dollars a year go to people
| who spent $10 on an asset in the unity store to back up a
| game that actually is interesting.
|
| Actually, even worse, they often AREN'T wasting millions on
| assets. Grand Turismo 7 has plenty of cars that are just
| copy/pasted from the previous release.
| nluken wrote:
| AAA games take thousands of hours of labor from huge teams to
| create. When you consider how much work goes into it, $70
| seems like a bargain. Also, if you account for inflation
| these kinds of games are cheaper now than they've been for
| most of gaming's history.
|
| In practice, however, many games fail to break out of super
| basic gameplay loops. I usually prefer cheaper indie games
| where I have more fun.
| Art9681 wrote:
| The trending story on the Microsoft gaming division side is how
| badly Xbox is doing. I don't think Microsoft is doing anyone a
| favor by acquiring gaming companies at this point. It's evident
| that Microsoft is where game development studios go to die.
|
| Bethesda's acquisition is extremely demoralizing due to this. I
| hope Starfield succeeds as it's my most anticipated game of all
| time.
| kernal wrote:
| >the CEO (Bobby Kotick) was accused of permitting workplace
| sexual harassment and employees at the company were on the
| verge of mutiny.
|
| >Microsoft received 721 employee complaints of discrimination
| and harassment in the U.S. between 2019 and 2021, and Microsoft
| investigators found most allegations to be "unsubstantiated".
|
| Excluding the 2022-23 complaints, I'm just wondering which
| company do you think is under more "chaos" and on the verge of
| "mutiny" right now?
| rvz wrote:
| Or maybe we should not be supporting horizontal integration of
| already large companies in the same industry acquiring other
| large companies.
|
| The acquisition of Bethesda doesn't help Microsoft's case of
| horizontal integration or even their future intentions with
| cloud gaming with the potential integration of their existing
| Xbox game pass service even if they acquired Activision-
| Blizzard.
|
| Seems like the UK regulators decision in that regard was the
| wise decision and it was the right one.
| [deleted]
| TheCaptain4815 wrote:
| Microsoft has practically destroyed every major game franchise
| it's owned in the past decade and Xbox only exists because it's
| being subsidized by Azure. Very happy with this decision.
| edgyquant wrote:
| It's nice that this was blocked, but they really should have
| blocked the Bethesda acquisition. Buying the best selling game
| franchise (Elder Scrolls) and making it an exclusive is a cut
| and dry anti-competitive move and Microsoft should have been
| punished for even trying.
| muststopmyths wrote:
| The new Gears of War was quite good, I thought. Nowhere near as
| bad as the new Halos.
| myrmidon wrote:
| Disagree somwhat; Age of Empires would be unlikely to do better
| under any other publisher IMO.
|
| The whole Gamepass thing also appears functional to me (i.e. I
| know people who pay money for it and are satisfied, unlike
| former Stadia).
|
| But I strongly believe that stopping consolidation in that
| market is a laudable move and am super happy with the decision
| to block this.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Minecraft and Mojang studios more broadly did great
| greenyoda wrote:
| Archive with full text of article: https://archive.ph/B5GYo
| crims0n wrote:
| | Britain's antitrust watchdog vetoed the gaming industry's
| biggest ever deal saying it would harm competition in cloud
| gaming
|
| Cloud gaming? Really? Seems a bit tone deaf. Is the CMA known for
| not understanding the markets they regulate?
| OJFord wrote:
| What's wrong with that?
| flohofwoe wrote:
| I guess the Xbox Game Pass subscription service can be
| considered a 'cloud gaming' service, and IIRC most concerns
| were about CoD vs Game Pass (e.g. if a new CoD game is
| available on Game Pass on day one of release that would indeed
| be an unfair advantage).
| crims0n wrote:
| Fair assessment, but I still think that is tangentially
| related at best - and only relevant to the cloud due to a
| bundled subscription.
| newsclues wrote:
| "e.g. if a new CoD game is available on Game Pass on day one
| of release that would indeed be an unfair advantage"
|
| Timed exclusives are not an unfair advantage, both Sony and
| MS have bought or paid for timed (or perpetual) exclusive
| games for their platforms.
|
| Are we going to make a rule that bans all exclusive games,
| and force developers to create ports for all system that
| launch on the same day?
| edgyquant wrote:
| This is a bs argument. There's a difference between having
| exclusives and buying up the producers of the worlds most
| popular cross platform games and making them exclusive.
| Adverblessly wrote:
| > Timed exclusives are not an unfair advantage, both Sony
| and MS have bought or paid for timed (or perpetual)
| exclusive games for their platforms.
|
| I don't think just because the two biggest actors can
| afford to pay for exclusivity that means that paying for
| exclusivity is fair. Would you expect itch.io to pay for
| exclusivity in order to compete in the games market?
|
| > Are we going to make a rule that bans all exclusive
| games, and force developers to create ports for all system
| that launch on the same day?
|
| If you made a rule about this, it would be about banning
| paying for exclusivity. If a developer wants to make a game
| exclusive to the PS5 that's up to them, but Sony can't pay
| them for the privilege.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| This is more like the Netflix model than the traditional
| timed exclusives model.
|
| E.g. the platform owner also owns all content production to
| stuff its channel with content.
|
| In the short term this can be good for gamers (as long as
| the platform owner throws absurd amounts of money around
| for content production in order to grow the subscription
| base), but I can't see this being good for the long run,
| especially when there are only two or three big players on
| the market, and no more independent game developers and
| publishers are left (Activision/Blizzard isn't exactly a
| fountain of creativity of course, so that's a bad example).
| panick21_ wrote:
| Cloud means internet.
| [deleted]
| johneth wrote:
| Cloud gaming is a growing market - they're preventing the deal
| on the hypothesis that it will give Microsoft a huge advantage
| in a growing market.
| crims0n wrote:
| In my opinion, it is only growing because it is bundled with
| popular subscription services like Game Pass. I don't think
| the sector has it's own legs to stand on, but time will tell.
| rwalle wrote:
| Look up GeForce NOW service. It's going well.
| sofixa wrote:
| The biggest cloud gaming services up until ~1-2 years ago
| were Geforce Now and Google Stadia (RIP). Xcloud gaming or
| whatever they call it today was extremely poor (latency and
| UX issues) and in limited beta, with a very limited
| library.
|
| Nowadays Stadia is dead, Xcloud is kind of usable under the
| condition you use a controller (which makes it a non-
| started for pretty much any non first-person game) and pay
| for Game Pass. Geforce Now is still going strong, has much
| better and stable quality and is the gold standard.
| tsgagnon wrote:
| _Cloud gaming is a growing market - they 're preventing the
| deal on the hypothesis that it will give Microsoft a huge
| advantage in a growing market._
|
| How does any large company build into a new/growing market
| without having a "huge advantage"? Do they have to wait until
| the market is matured from smaller companies before they can
| get into that market?
| jarym wrote:
| They are known for it but you've heard the old saying... even a
| broken clock is right twice a day.
| nottorp wrote:
| I would have thought the same, but then i tried GeForce Now.
|
| It works Just Fine(tm) (with fiber internet) but guess what's
| missing: a lot of AAA titles.
|
| So yes, there's a problem with cloud gaming.
|
| Not sure if it's mine or theirs though. I don't have a gaming
| PC right now, only a PS5. Since we're speaking of ActiBlizzard,
| i maybe would try Diablo 4 if it were available on GeForce Now.
| But it isn't and I won't.
|
| Incidentally, I doubt there will be a console Diablo 4 for the
| PS5 either. They were too far into the acquisition process to
| not dump non Microsoft platforms.
| PretzelPirate wrote:
| Didn't Microsoft agree that Nvidia could stream ABK games on
| GeForce Now if the deal closed? It seems like it could have
| helped GeForce Now grow.
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| Yes but the deal only lasts 10 years, and there's been a
| hold up, even after a couple of months the games are still
| not on it. Presumably this is because MS want the games on
| their windows store instead of being buyable through Steam
| which is already integrated with GFN. It seems problematic.
| PretzelPirate wrote:
| 10 years is more than enough to attract a player base and
| establish themselves as a place where games need to be
| launched.
|
| I'm not sure what you mean by there being a hold up. I
| assumed the deal was dependent on the ABK deal going
| through, which the CMA just blocked and they've all but
| guaranteed that GeForce Now won't get Call of Duty.
| nottorp wrote:
| Tbh I'm not interested in multiplayer shooters, so they
| can keep Call of Duty, but a lot of other titles i'm
| interested in (and sometimes even own on steam) aren't
| there either.
| mdemare wrote:
| > Incidentally, I doubt there will be a console Diablo 4 for
| the PS5 either.
|
| https://www.playstation.com/en-us/games/diablo-iv/
| pbalcer wrote:
| By cloud gaming they probably mean things like Playstation Plus
| and Xbox Game Pass, because, in the higher tiers, they come
| bundled with streaming access to the games in the service.
| justeleblanc wrote:
| You can read their 418 pages report here and see if they
| understand what they're about:
| https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/644939aa529ed...
| Section 8, "Theory of harm 2: Vertical effects in cloud gaming
| services", starts on page 192 and contains 442 paragraphs. The
| conclusion is about two pages long, I encourage you to read it.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| What is your opinion on that text?
| jerrygenser wrote:
| Why is this tone deaf? A lot of aaa gaming today could be
| considered cloud gaming -- although I'm not sure of the exact
| definition.
|
| Consider dota 2 -- it's a service entirely on the cloud
| continuously updated.
|
| The list goes on with in terms of aaa games offered by either
| company where the main offering is actually multiplayer.
| rwalle wrote:
| Eh, most people looking at this don't consider dota 2 in the
| same bucket as the cloud gaming concerned here. It means
| Assassin's Creed played on Geforce Now or Forza Horizon
| played on Xbox Game Pass. My very loose definition is that
| these are games that usually have a single-player mode are
| originally intended to be played on a game console, but are
| run and rendered on cloud services and then transmitted to
| user (of course you can find lots of exceptions). Dota 2, by
| contrast, is an "online" game, more specifically MOBA -- this
| is on Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dota_2
| [deleted]
| crims0n wrote:
| Typically it means gaming workloads rendered in the cloud,
| which artificially appears popular at the moment because it
| comes bundled with game subscription services such as
| Playstation Plus and Xbox Game Pass - but as Stadia's failure
| would seem to indicate, nobody wants to pay for a dedicated
| cloud gaming service. Doesn't seem like a profitable sector
| of the market.
|
| Nonetheless, my point was that cloud gaming is probably the
| least concerning part of the merger.
| rwalle wrote:
| I know it's not your main point, but I need to mention that
| the failure of Stadia does not indicate the failure of
| cloud gaming in general but the problem of Stadia itself.
| There are plenty of other cloud gaming options growing
| every day.
| 0x457 wrote:
| > Stadia's failure would seem to indicate, nobody wants to
| pay for a dedicated cloud gaming service.
|
| Not so sure about this. Stadia was an odd service - even
| google's own devices (new google tv for example) didn't
| support stadia. You had to pay for subscription + a whole
| game price in most cases.
|
| Combine that with the fact that people already made peace
| with stadia being shutdown before it even launched - who
| wants to pay money for a game that can disappear any day.
|
| I had Stadia and played from time to time. I know people
| who used Stadia exclusively. I play xCloud all the time on
| my iPad... Stadia had a market, just it being from Google
| killed it. Well, publishers also played their role there -
| they wanted consumers to buy games again instead of just
| giving them access to steam.
|
| Shadow, GeForce Now and Amazon Luna are still alive.
| doikor wrote:
| In this context it means streaming the game from cloud
| (xCloud, GeForce NOW, Luna, etc)
| jokoon wrote:
| I wonder what are the actors who invest in small indie games. It
| seems like the indie game market is quite a complex, with a lot
| of bad games, but still a few games of high quality who deserve
| so much more attention.
|
| I really wish there were investors who could better invest in the
| indie game market and at least take more risks and burn more
| cash, even if it's socially questionable.
|
| Every respectable gamer knows, deep in his heart, that the AAA
| game business is a horror show.
|
| I restrict myself to indie games and I have more and more trouble
| finding a game that I can actually like and spend time with, it's
| hard to say if that's because I'm old or if I have very specific
| tastes or if I set the bar too high.
|
| There are a lot of developers out there who are ready to make
| games, yet it seems the market rarely lets them. Of course,
| quality matters, but the top reason I want to make games, is
| because I cannot find games I can enjoy, would they AAA or indie.
|
| Important note: I dislike capitalism.
| jxf wrote:
| > I really wish there were investors who could better invest in
| the indie game market and at least take more risks and burn
| more cash, even if it's socially questionable.
|
| The challenge is that many games are labors of love that are
| fantastically unprofitable. AAA games with microtransactions
| are unpopular but very lucrative.
| jokoon wrote:
| Profitability cannot be the only motive. A small fraction of
| those profits could be invested in indie games to diversify
| and just have "better games", not just profits.
|
| Stop using the devil's advocate at every occasion.
| Dudeman112 wrote:
| Whenever people mention the awful state of the industry, I
| feel an urge to point out that the only thing that matters in
| a capitalist society is what the consumer votes for with
| their wallet
|
| Ubisoft is far from bankrupt. EA is far from bankrupt. All
| the microtransactions, all the stupid "big open world"
| bollocks, all mind numbing grind-a-thons, the sheer creative
| bankruptcy that AAA games often show... they are what people
| consistently vote for, _every year_
|
| In the last month, the last Carl On Duty has made more money
| than Ultrakill ever will. By a few orders of magnitude. And
| the same will happen for the next one
|
| If gamers wanted quality, they should have spent their money
| accordingly instead of consistently buying shit
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > If gamers wanted quality, they should have spent their
| money accordingly instead of consistently buying shit
|
| The key thing is marketing. The giants have _insane_
| amounts of budget to market their games to heaven and
| beyond.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > unpopular but very lucrative.
|
| How do you resolve that oxymoron?
| newsclues wrote:
| There are a small number of whales that support micro
| transaction games.
|
| These games tend to be F2P to have a community for the
| whales to play with, but the games aren't particularly fun
| and popular enough to attract a large player base that will
| pay for the game.
|
| Free things that people play because it's free aren't the
| most popular, they are just available.
| mirages wrote:
| Can someone explains me why a UK court is able to block a deal
| between 2 US corps ?
|
| How can they overreach ?
| desas wrote:
| The two US corps both want to do business in the UK. If the two
| US corps don't want to do business in the UK, they can feel
| free to ignore the UK authorities.
| unionpivo wrote:
| Well if the two US companies that do business in US and with US
| residents, than UK court would not have any jurisdiction. (And
| would not even try, it's not like they don't have other things
| to do.)
|
| But in this case, you have two US businesses, that own local UK
| business and do business on UK soil with UK customers. That is
| why they fall also under jurisdiction of UK.
|
| MS and Activison could close their business in UK, and stop
| serving their customers and then they would not be affected by
| UK courts.
|
| Bottom line is, if you do business in multiple places, you need
| to play by the rules of all that places.
|
| It's similar how the legislation in lets say California can
| affect products in all the USA.
| drumhead wrote:
| It only relates to their activities in the Uk. MS would have to
| either comply with any remedial measures or just stop operating
| in there.
| Jowsey wrote:
| Presumably by banning them from business in the UK if they go
| through with it
| M2Ys4U wrote:
| Microsoft are free to withdraw from the UK market to avoid
| being regulated by UK regulators.
|
| But unless they do, the UK has the right to regulate its own
| market in the way that they see fit, irrespective of whether
| that impacts on other markets (modulo international trade
| agreements).
| agd wrote:
| I'm glad with this decision. Not sure the exact logic makes
| sense, but in general the top US tech companies (Google, Amazon,
| MS, Meta, Apple) are too big. They wield huge power and can snuff
| out entire startup sectors with loss-leading products.
|
| The argument is always 'but we don't have a monopoly in this
| artificially small sector X', however I don't think that argument
| is the one we should be looking at when the companies involved
| are $1trillion+.
|
| Can we prove exact consumer harm in each case? No. However, I
| think most people can accept that there's a risk to consumers,
| markets, and democracy if companies become too big.
|
| Edit. Seeing a lot of comments saying UK couldn't function
| without Microsoft which kind of supports my point.
| somenameforme wrote:
| At least in the US it wasn't even about monopolies, but about
| whether or not a merger would negatively affect competition.
| [1] But at some point it feels like the FTC simply stopped
| enforcing its own guidelines, at least when large enough
| players were involved. Because it's somewhat self evident that
| the overwhelmingly majority of big corp mergers over the past
| couple of decades have completely crippled competition.
|
| That said, I think this indirectly feeds off your core point -
| this 'new direction' of the FTC is almost certainly because
| these companies have become far too 'influential' owing to
| their size and power. I think one could even generalize a
| simple test: "Would the immediate collapse of this company
| meaningfully imperil the US economy, security, or other
| significant interests?" If so, that company needs to be split
| up until the answer is no.
|
| [1] - https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-
| guidance/gui...
| fallingknife wrote:
| Large tech companies are nothing like banks and have no
| mechanism to immediately collapse. In fact, the fact that
| their collapse would imperil the US economy is a 100%
| guarantee that they won't collapse because it means people
| are dependent on buying their products.
|
| And if you did break them up, it wouldn't solve the problem
| at all. Whatever company is in charge of Windows is still
| going to be critical no matter the size. It depends on the
| importance of the software product in the tech industry, not
| the size of the company like it does in banking.
| vxNsr wrote:
| The difference is that if Windows corp isn't part of the
| O365 corp then they're both forced to work with competitors
| instead of forcing you into their walled garden.
|
| How nice would it be if all the features that you get from
| the windows/O365/Onedrive synergy were available to any
| cloud competitor? So I could pair word/excel sync with my
| own self-hosted cloud. I could back up all my files using
| the native tools to any cloud provider. That's the sort of
| benefit you could theoretically have by breaking up
| Microsoft.
| throwaway675309 wrote:
| This. This is exactly why I am ideologically opposed to working
| for a FAANG. You can do more than just avoiding purchasing
| their products - giving them your labor and resources allows
| these companies to gain even more power and influence than they
| already have.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _but in general the top US tech companies... are too big_
|
| > _I think most people can accept that there 's a risk to
| consumers, markets, and democracy if companies become too big._
|
| I don't think that's true at all. If you want to make an
| argument that companies are too big, you need some exact logic
| to support it.
|
| The only solid arguments I'm aware of are specifically
| regarding banks because of their systemic impact on the economy
| -- the become "too big to fail" and thereby become a moral
| hazard situation. Although given the efficiencies of large
| banks, the solution has become to regulate them more tightly to
| prevent moral hazards, not to break them up.
|
| But the idea that tech companies are too big doesn't have the
| same kind of logic behind it, and your assertion that they
| "snuff out entire startup sectors" doesn't seem to be supported
| by any evidence. To the contrary, they _invest_ in entire
| startup sectors and competing top tech companies buy competing
| startups to supercharge them. Competition is _thriving_ as the
| big tech firms compete _with each other_.
|
| In the modern era of Big Tech, consumers seem to be doing
| great, markets seem to be doing great, and Big Tech's _size_ is
| probably not even in the top 50 threats to democracy. The
| effects of _social media_ is surely in the top 5 threats to
| democracy, but that has nothing whatsoever to do with the size
| of the company that owns a social network.
| agd wrote:
| > Competition is thriving as the big tech firms compete with
| each other.
|
| Thriving competition wouldn't result in super profits year on
| year.
| safog wrote:
| Organic growth towards computing and digital does that.
| Time spent online is increasing, services are getting
| better, people are moving to the cloud from on-prem etc.
| etc.
|
| It's not a zero sum game right now. The moment FAANGs are
| in a zero sum game trying to cannibalize each others'
| market shares I predict HN won't even have an argument
| around if tech firms are too big. That means tech has
| plateaued and has become a mature business like Coca cola
| or Kroger.
| Brusco_RF wrote:
| Why is profit a metric that you want to minimize? Do you
| have any other metric that shows lack of competition?
| Because the above poster outlined some pretty strong
| positive ones
| rglullis wrote:
| > consumers seem to be doing great
|
| I want some of that stuff you are smoking.
|
| Vendor lock-in. Planned obsolescence. Common, established
| features being removed in favor of proprietary protocols or
| connectors. Data privacy violations.
|
| All of that because we like free/cheap stuff. Saying Big Tech
| is good to consumers is like saying Big Pharma is good
| because their opiods are chemically pure.
| istjohn wrote:
| Reducing the number of companies reduces the competition that
| drives up wages and drives down prices and drives up service
| and product quality. Consider this:
| https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2018/08/corporate-profits-
| ve....
| jpetso wrote:
| My big concern with large companies is cross-selling. For the
| sake of argument, let's assume that Google rightfully won the
| Internet, Apple rightfully won smartphones, Microsoft
| rightfully (?) won operating systems, etc.
|
| All of them tried, competition was hot, the market picked a
| winner.
|
| But what's next is a market distortion. Google uses their
| front page to push Chrome over Firefox, Apple doesn't care to
| make any of their other devices (e.g. Watch, HomePod)
| interoperate with other platforms, Microsoft packs Windows
| with ads for Office 365, OneDrive, and so on. All of Big Tech
| is perpetually obsessed with owning platforms as opposed to
| products, because once you control a platform, it gives you
| the leverage/"moat" to continue profiting without the
| corresponding investment into competing fairly. Thriving
| competition would be to have to compete independently in each
| market, rather than winning one and then extending that win
| to other markets by tilting the playing field.
|
| Activision Blizzard falls nicely into this category as it's
| explicitly designed to gain an edge over Sony in gaming.
| Cloud gaming or not, it's clear to everyone that the general
| idea is improve the standing of Xbox products and Windows PCs
| by using the leverage of CoD as an existing market winner. As
| opposed to making the platform compete on its own terms.
| That's a market distortion.
|
| The fact that large companies put large amounts of resources
| into startups and developing new markets doesn't mean that
| they compete fairly, or that it's a better outcome for
| society/consumers than an alternative reality where each
| product by itself would compete on its own merits, and
| companies could win markets independently rather than having
| to sell to existing market leaders for extra leverage.
| Brybry wrote:
| Big Tech companies have a history of buying smaller tech
| companies and ending or decreasing the products/services that
| the smaller companies provided which makes life worse for
| consumers.
|
| In game development specifically there's a line of successful
| studios that were devoured and their game franchises
| destroyed or made creatively poorer.
| nine_k wrote:
| My question is always: why did they sell? I suppose a small
| company is usually private, so it can't be a target of a
| _hostile_ takeover.
|
| The owners likely saw it as a better deal financially. Sad
| but usually true.
|
| I like the idea of "meat" and "milk" startups, like cow
| breeds; "meat" companies are created to grow fast and be
| sold (and usually butchered), and "milk" companies are kept
| more stable and independent, to fulfill their purpose, not
| (just) in hopes of a purely financial gain.
| pyrale wrote:
| > My question is always: why did they sell? I suppose a
| small company is usually private, so it can't be a target
| of a hostile takeover.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/07/emails-
| detail-am...
|
| Similar stories exist for every single of the big tech
| companies.
| nine_k wrote:
| How can a game franchise be destroyed by price cuts from
| a competitor? (Honest question.)
| orra wrote:
| > I don't think that's true at all. If you want to make an
| argument that companies are too big, you need some exact
| logic to support it.
|
| It's well known that oligopolies are bad for efficient
| pricing, just like with (though not as extreme as)
| monopolies.
|
| That's why EU competition law rightly focuses on "significant
| market power", rather than US competition law which cares
| little unless there is a literal monopoly. (Currently, the UK
| retains EU competition law).
| nine_k wrote:
| When resources of a private company seriously outweigh those
| of a government, it may become a problem; see "banana
| republics" [1]. That is, regulations cannot work against a
| sufficiently overwhelming force.
|
| "Snuffing entire sectors" is unlikely, even though buying and
| shutting down a potentially viable competitor is not uncommon
| in the business world. Google in particular bought and
| eventually closed a number of startups, but, to my mind, it
| was mostly because they did not happen to be fast enough
| growing, not to kill competition. There is some research [2]
| showing that companies do buy other companies to kill a
| competitor, but this is very far from being the majority of
| cases.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic#Honduras
|
| [2]: https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/do-companies-buy-
| comp...
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Sadly we are probably too late now. Need to dissect them into
| multiple entities (and maybe create more jobs) earlier.
| snapcaster wrote:
| What makes you think it's too late?
| markus_zhang wrote:
| They already got enough political power.
| jerjerjer wrote:
| Maybe "artificially large"?
| passwordoops wrote:
| >"Seeing a lot of comments saying UK couldn't function without
| Microsoft"
|
| _Too Big to Fail_ should be recast as _Too Big to Exist_
| rqtwteye wrote:
| Totally agree. These huge companies are terrible for the
| overall economy, destroy innovation and contribute to
| inequality.
| 015a wrote:
| Its extremely frustrating how we let the tech companies get to
| be this large, such that now we really have to consider
| blocking every acquisition, even though this one in particular
| I think wouldn't be all that bad and may actually be a positive
| for consumers. Activision is an unusually cruel and extremely
| horrible company, whereas the Xbox Division of Microsoft has
| been one of maybe only a couple "great" stewards of the gaming
| industry for consumers (Epic is also a great company, but
| beyond those two when it comes to major developers/publishers
| there's far more bad than good). I'm genuinely of the opinion
| that all of Xbox, Activision, and their customers will be
| worse-off without this deal.
|
| This is a HackerNews Arm Chair Quarterbacking Stretch, but I
| think a really positive move for Microsoft would be to spin-off
| Xbox into a separate company. I can't imagine the division is
| all that profitable; its grown to confer practically zero
| positive network effects for Microsoft's other businesses.
| Culturally its got to be the weirdest thing Microsoft does
| nowadays. This AB deal likely single-handedly increases the
| valuation of the division by, jeeze, 50%? Maybe more.
| zopppo wrote:
| > Its extremely frustrating how we let the tech companies get
| to be this large, such that now we really have to consider
| blocking every acquisition, even though this one in
| particular I think wouldn't be all that bad and may actually
| be a positive for consumers.
|
| As an avid world of warcraft player, the community as a whole
| has been hoping the merger goes through for exactly this
| reason. Activision has seemingly forced through a lot of bad
| changes over the years to try wring out as much money as they
| can.
| segasaturn wrote:
| I'm a part of the StarCraft 2 community and we were
| similarly hopeful about this deal as StarCraft has been
| neglected by the company for years. The community was
| already in full doom mode over Korean tournament funding
| getting pulled, this is not going to improve the
| atmosphere.
| taeric wrote:
| I'm curious on how a MS merger would be good? At the start,
| they would almost certainly try to merge user accounts into
| MSN accounts. Likely force a migration down the line, after
| merging doesn't work.
| 867-5309 wrote:
| >force a migration down the line, after merging doesn't
| work
|
| like the Mojang --> Microsoft --> XBox fiasco
| taeric wrote:
| Exactly what I was referencing. I should have said it. :D
| themitigating wrote:
| If they merge user accounts but you can support for older
| products or other game changes it's possible people would
| be ok with that
| taeric wrote:
| Certainly many would be ok with it. The ones it will hurt
| will be the heavy users that have multiple accounts, is
| my guess. Also is annoying to families. Game accounts are
| just game accounts, even if that has grown. Giving the
| kids an MSN account did not sit well with me.
| happy54672 wrote:
| The way I think others are thinking about it is that to
| Activision, making innovative new franchises or long term
| investments in general is a big risk since they are 100%
| a games company. Whereas if Microsoft owns them may face
| less pressure to cut costs/long term investments since it
| would make up a much smaller part of Microsoft's
| financials.
|
| Whether that is how things usually turn out in practice
| with these sorts of acquisitions is a question I don't
| have a good answer to.
| taeric wrote:
| I just don't think I've seen evidence from MS that they
| foster that sort of thing, either? Have they shown that
| they can do a new franchise?
|
| Or is the idea that MS would just dump a lot of money on
| them? Do they have a track record of that?
| kelnos wrote:
| I'm not sure "I want my favorite game to get better" is a
| good reason to allow more mega-conglomeration.
| pb7 wrote:
| >Epic is also a great company
|
| No, it's not. It does the exact same shit that Activision
| does except it targets an even younger more vulnerable
| demographic. Did you forget about this?
| https://www.ftc.gov/business-
| guidance/blog/2022/12/245-milli...
| waboremo wrote:
| I wonder when the FTC is going to crack down on mobile
| gaming for this reason. Google and Apple profit
| tremendously from various companies targeting vulnerable
| demographics in their games.
| 015a wrote:
| I don't agree with the FTC's conclusion on that case, and
| while it doesn't reflect positively on Epic, its not nearly
| as negative as the myriad of things other gaming companies
| do on the regular (lootboxes being a big one, which are
| still very common in Activision, EA, & Valve games, among
| others). Epic is one of the good ones; that doesn't mean
| they always do good things.
| panopticon wrote:
| > _Epic is one of the good ones_
|
| Maybe if your only comparison is Activision and EA. When
| you consider all the dark patterns Fortnite employs to
| encourage logging playtime and making purchases, they're
| only separated from those others by degrees. Stacked up
| against developers that largely avoid those patterns
| (FromSoft, Nintendo, CDPR, etc), Epic is most certainly
| closer to the "bad" side of the spectrum.
| majormajor wrote:
| I have a tough time coming down to hard on free to play
| Fortnite. You _can_ spend more. They incentivize you to
| spend more. That 's been a staple in fashion for a long
| time.
|
| But at the same time I think there's something cool about
| being able to hop in without shelling out $60. And
| getting updates and new content for years.
| pb7 wrote:
| Their target demographic is kids whose brains haven't
| developed yet and are unable to resist buying shiny
| digital things with their parents' credit cards and Epic
| makes sure to add as little resistance as possible. It's
| no surprise they wanted to add their own payment system
| to Fornite on iOS: Apple's has too much friction and
| parental controls to prevent abuse like this. The
| commission Apple collected was just a drop in the big
| bucket they were after.
|
| From the FTC blog post:
|
| >The FTC alleges that with millions of consumers' credit
| cards conveniently in hand, Epic failed to adequately
| explain its billing practices to customers and designed
| its interface in ways that led to unauthorized charges.
| You'll want to read the complaint for details, but here
| are a few of the dark patterns the company allegedly
| used.
|
| >According to the complaint, Epic set up its payment
| system so that it saved by default the credit card that
| was associated with the account. That meant that kids
| could buy V-Bucks - the virtual currency necessary to
| make in-game purchases - with the simple press of a
| button. No separate cardholder consent was required.
|
| Scum. Glad Apple booted them from the App Store and the
| courts sided with Apple.
| pb7 wrote:
| Yeah, I have no idea how GP thinks Epic is the gold
| standard. There are way better developers with extremely
| successful games that don't have this bullshit: Naughty
| Dog (Last of Us, Uncharted), FromSoft (mentioned, Elden
| Ring), Portkey Games (Hogwarts Legacy), Guerrilla Games
| (Horizon), Insomniac (Spider-Man), Santa Monica Studios
| (God of War), Sucker Punch (Ghost of Tsushima), Rockstar
| (Red Dead Redemption, Grand Theft Auto[0]) and many
| others. Epic is near the bottom of the list, not the top.
|
| [0] The online has micro-transactions but even if it
| didn't exist, the single player experience is well worth
| the money alone and is on par with all the others.
| throwaway7679 wrote:
| Listing Microsoft and Epic as good guys is wack.
| "Disagreeing" that Epic's practices are clear-cut
| intentional abuse had me searching for a punchline.
| 015a wrote:
| > I have no idea how GP thinks Epic is the gold standard.
|
| Where, exactly, did you read "gold standard"? No one said
| that. No one hinted to that. The words stated were "great
| company" and "one of the good ones".
| pb7 wrote:
| Epic is neither of those so it doesn't matter.
|
| >Epic is also a great company, but beyond those two when
| it comes to major developers/publishers there's far more
| bad than good
|
| I listed all major developers, many of which are owned by
| mega publishers like Sony.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| Hogwarts Legacy certainly looks good, but the mobile game
| hogwarts mystery(or something like that) by the same
| studio was full of dark patterns and also devoid of
| actual gameplay.
| 015a wrote:
| But you just listed companies that aren't even
| comparable; they're at _entirely_ different market
| capitalizations. FromSoft and CDPR are babies compared to
| Xbox, Sony, Nintendo, Activision, EA, and Epic. FromSoft
| has a rough valuation (its hard, because they 're owned
| by Kadokawa) of maybe the low nine figures. CDPR is
| larger, in the low billions. Epic is like $40 billion.
| Activision, clearly, around $85B. EA, around $35B. And
| Microsoft/Sony, obviously, a lot, lot more.
|
| Team Cherry and concernedape are also extremely amazing
| and ethical developers. But they aren't peers to the
| companies we're talking about. Its easy to be ethical
| when you're small. Its laudable to maintain a sense of
| those ethics when you're large, even if the absolute
| measure isn't a perfect score.
|
| Nintendo is _far_ scummier than you let on; they 're
| among the scummiest video game companies on the planet.
| It just doesn't come through in their fantastic and
| "pure" gaming experiences; but the fights their legal
| team chooses to engage in are ugly, despicable, and very
| unique among gaming companies.
| pb7 wrote:
| Then what you meant to say is that it's a good _business_
| , not a good _[video game] company_. Good video game
| companies make good video games, of which there are many
| others. Epic, Activision, and EA have high valuations
| because their games are filled with micro-transactions,
| not because their games are superior to others. This is
| good for investors but not consumers (who your original
| comment was championing).
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Team Cherry and concernedape are also extremely amazing
| and ethical developers.
|
| Team Cherry produced a great game. I wouldn't be willing
| to call them a good company or a good team; their track
| record shows as plainly as you could possibly wish that
| they are terrible at developing games.
| munificent wrote:
| The solution to Activision being horrible shouldn't be to let
| it get eaten by a marginally less horrible even more giant
| company.
|
| It should be to break it into smaller pieces so that
| consumers have the flexibility to avoid the more toxic
| segments of the company and the market can decide whether
| their bad behavior matters or not.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "Its extremely frustrating how we let the tech companies get
| to be this large,"
|
| With how quickly tech changes and the risks involved,
| companies have to find multiple revenue streams if they want
| to survive. Pretty much every startup dream is to one day
| become a huge company.
| iepathos wrote:
| > spin-off Xbox into a separate company. I can't imagine the
| division is all that profitable
|
| only like $5 billion in annual revenue, doubt they'll want to
| let that go for no reason.
| ldoughty wrote:
| Is part of what makes companies like this horrible the fact
| they WANT to get bought?
|
| The one company I have in depth knowledge of going through an
| acquisition tried to drive employees away where possible, and
| fire others, down to a skeleton crew of overworked
| disgruntled employees because it makes them look REALLY good
| in the short term for being acquired.
|
| If you couldn't count on acquisitions by larger companies
| being approved easily, the only other way to game companies
| can generate profit is by maintaining current games (at least
| to being playable, without terrible reviews from bugs), and
| /or develop new games...
| toyg wrote:
| _> Activision is an unusually cruel and extremely horrible
| company, whereas the Xbox Division_
|
| Even if this were true, there is no guarantee that the
| acquiring culture will actually be imposed on the acquired.
| In fact it's often the opposite, with the acquired
| "infecting" the parent company - particularly when the
| acquired comes with a large headcount.
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| Games aren't bad for MS, It brings in more than 3 billion a
| quarter.
|
| How many times have you seen I do most of my stuff on Linux
| but I still boot in to windows for games. An independent xbox
| would be less likely to use Windows for their OS.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| Given how badly the Xbox for Windows system functions (lots
| of games don't even support the Xbox Series S/X controller
| reliably until you set them up to use Steam as their
| launcher), it already seems like the Xbox organization
| doesn't think much about Windows.
| dmonitor wrote:
| Xbox is loss leading _hard_ for Microsoft right now. Profits
| are down, console sales are down, and things on the horizon
| are looking not too great. If Xbox spun off, they'd go out of
| business within the decade because there's no reason to own
| one besides taking advantage of Microsoft's net-negative
| gaming subscription.
| davemp wrote:
| It seems like video game consoles aren't competing based on
| practicality (hardware) anymore and are mostly just rent
| seeking with ways to abuse the legal/IP system.
|
| There used to be a much bigger moat to assemble a platform
| that could play cutting edge games. Now PC game
| engines/graphics drivers are getting so good the console
| SDKs aren't such a big boon and the hardware is basically
| just CotS.
| dmonitor wrote:
| Yeah. Sony and Nintendo still try to shake things up with
| their bespoke controllers and hardware doohickeys, but
| Microsoft's approach is just to release plain old PCs
| that only run their code.
| seventhtiger wrote:
| Nintendo would be successful even without hardware. Their
| IPs have firmly planted themselves in global awareness to
| an unimaginable level. They'd give Disney a run for their
| money.
|
| Then on top of that they built an ecosystem of toys and
| software to monetize their adoring customers.
|
| Nintendo recognized the deadend of the hardware race in
| the early 2000s, and continued developing their "mascots"
| while Sony and MS abandoned theirs. I don't think
| Microsoft and Sony have the DNA to pull of something like
| this. They are still software and hardware companies
| respectively.
| [deleted]
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I feel like with Gamepass and all their exclusives being day
| 1 on Windows as well, there's probably more crossover
| nowadays than there has been in years, but overall you're
| right that spinning out Xbox entirely would make a lot of
| sense.
| newswasboring wrote:
| Is the xbox division the main gaming division of MS?
| mehlmao wrote:
| They can't spin out Gamepass because it is a money pit.
| There aren't enough subscribers to fund large budget game
| development. At the same time, Gamepass trains subscribers
| to not purchase new games, because they'll be on Gamepass
| eventually.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I hate the idea of Gamepass because I saw it happen to
| cable television.
|
| In the 1980s, for instance, MTV really showed music
| videos. It got bought by old fogey Sumner Redstone who
| decided unilaterally that we couldn't see music videos
| anymore -- funny now that we have YouTube it's been
| discovered that people want to watch music videos when
| they can. (A bit of destruction like Musk buying
| Twitter?)
|
| If you buy a game you are voting with your dollar, if you
| subscribe they're going to make an _Assassin 's Creed_
| game this year, and next year, and the year after that,
| and the year after that. The game industry is going to
| make whatever games it wants to make, and Microsoft will
| pay them, and I guess people will play them because they
| don't have a choice. We saw that with cable, since they
| get paid whether or not you watch, they can skimp on
| quality and collect increasing payments year after year.
| The movie and TV industry has been driven mad by
| streaming because suddenly performance matters... Disney
| is completely capable of producing a product that upholds
| it's brand but why do it when you can get $7 a month from
| every cable subscriber for ESPN whether or not they watch
| sports?
| kbenson wrote:
| I'm confused why you think they aren't tracking what
| games are played for how long, and won't optimize based
| on that. I would assume there's some royalty type
| situation with gamepass where the games that get played
| more get some percentage of a pool.
|
| You can rail about cable all you want, but some of the
| best shows of the last few decades were on cable.
| Breaking bad, mad men, the shield. Greatly expanding the
| choices allowed for networks to take risks in attempts to
| gain a small but I yerested audience, rather than having
| to appeal to the entire general public, and what we got
| was amazing.
| 0x457 wrote:
| Because that's not what gives them money. They are
| tracking what games bring in new subscribers.
| smolder wrote:
| More time spent does not equal enjoyment. Some games
| treat their players like employees and make them work
| pretty hard for their imaginary prizes. I wouldn't want a
| games library optimized for maximum time expenditure.
| kbenson wrote:
| While I agree paying out based on time spent may
| incentivize games into poor behavior, I think there are
| ways to account for that (e.g. weeks of the month the
| game was played more than an hour or two total). Greatly
| reducing the up-front investment to try out a game allows
| for different types of games to find an audience.
|
| If I have to pay $20 to try out some indie title, I might
| put it off a long time until it's on sale or never try
| it. If it's already included in a subscription I pay for,
| I might try it early or right after hearing some buzz
| about it. More people jumping in on that buzz can create
| a wave of enthusiasm that greatly increases the reach of
| the game that wouldn't happen if a similar number of
| sales trickled in over an extended period, which might
| increase players (and possibly sales on other platforms)
| more than otherwise.
|
| It's been noted many times in the past, some of the big
| breaks for indie studios were when they got accepted into
| these programs or ones like it.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I've only seen a few games so I can't say this is
| universal but when I play Japanese games on the Xbox all
| of the achievements say something like "5.4% of gamers
| accomplished this" which indicates that very few people
| finish this games, but a few western games I played
| didn't seem to show these percentages and I wonder if
| this is an attempt to work on people's psychology.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I didn't realize this was a thing that could be
| enabled/disabled per-game. I think _all_ achievements on
| Steam come with the "x.x% got this" stat.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| No kidding. The whole idea of (even partially) evaluating
| a game's value/quality by how long it takes to finish it
| is a mind virus. It leads to bloated, grindy experiences
| where a shorter game might have been more appropriate or
| even more fun.
| coldpie wrote:
| > I would assume there's some royalty type situation with
| gamepass where the games that get played more get some
| percentage of a pool.
|
| My understanding is for non-exceptional games (like, not
| Fortnite-scale), they just provide a flat fee with a
| fixed-length contract. Your studio gets $X and it will be
| on GamePass for Y months. I'm sure gameplay stats are
| taken into account for future contract renewals or for
| other games with the same studio, but no, I don't think
| there is any kind of explicit revenue sharing going on.
| It can be a hard decision for studios, since they have to
| balance lost income from sales against the guaranteed
| income and added publicity from being on GamePass.
|
| Source: Stuff I remember from podcasts, mostly Brandon
| Sheffield on Insert Credit. Sorry, I know that's not a
| great reference =/
| mustacheemperor wrote:
| >has been one of maybe only a couple "great" stewards of the
| gaming industry for consumers
|
| I'm not sure I'd give them much credit on this, since MS/Xbox
| hasn't achieved much at all in the gaming industry over
| recent years. Maybe there's not much egregious evil there
| a-la Activision's leadership scandals, but the track record
| is not great.
|
| As a gaming industry consumer who's been playing Microsoft
| consoles and games my entire life, MS has recently:
|
| - Ruined the Halo franchise
|
| - Stymied the current console gen with the Series S' weak
| memory capabilities
|
| - Acquired multiple beloved studios and released little to
| nothing over 5+ years, with their highest profile release
| being Starfield, the game Bethesda was already developing
| when MS bought them and made it a platform exclusive
|
| - Edit: Forgot trying to turn the Xbox One into an always-
| online TV set-top box
|
| Spinning off Xbox might be a good idea, if it's MS' senior
| leadership that keeps hamstringing their success. Because if
| the Activision acquisition proceeded like their previous
| studio acquisitions, we would see one or two Activision games
| release in the next decade, along with maybe a mediocre COD
| TV show.
| waboremo wrote:
| Xbox's role in the gaming industry has, funny enough, very
| little to do with Xbox itself. It's their competitive
| presence that has kept Playstation from stagnating and
| making terrible decisions. You can see this extremely
| clearly when the 360 was outselling the PS3 and
| Playstation/Sony made plenty of management changes to shift
| directions.
| mustacheemperor wrote:
| I can agree there - MS has an important competitive role
| in the marketplace and it's not like Sony has always been
| a great steward to the community by comparison. I have
| mixed feelings about exclusives in general, but Sony has
| certainly played that game more than MS.
|
| But the 360 was unveiled in 2005 and was replaced in the
| market a decade ago. My criticisms are really oriented to
| the last 5-10 years. On that note, I'm reminded of the
| Xbox One "your game console is for watching TV and will
| always be connected to the internet" release. And in that
| generation, it was the clamoring market and Sony's
| response (like the classic 'how to share secondhand
| games' video[0]) that pushed Microsoft to stop acting
| unreasonably.
|
| [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48nCBnc9VBs
| waboremo wrote:
| Yes that's very true! Much to their benefit, Playstation
| has been positively aggressive in recent years, I would
| attribute a lot of that to Mark Cerny (and the core
| platform tooling team) learning from PS3 mistakes and
| making the platform prioritize ease of development, and
| also from Xbox's mistakes on trying to pivot to general
| entertainment.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| > - Edit: Forgot trying to turn the Xbox One into an
| always-online TV set-top box
|
| people call this a terrible idea, i thought it was a great
| fucking idea. At the time, and frankly still, streaming
| apps are mostly what we use tvs for these days, and the
| platforms to run them that are shipped INSIDE of the tvs we
| buy fucking suck, uniformly.
|
| While the xbox was built as a gaming console initially all
| they really wanted to do was expand that notion. It could
| be an everything box for your '10 ft experience' It could
| play games, and be a dvr, and be a streaming interface, and
| and and. They could easily spin out another sku with lower
| specs to curtail some of the gaming power and make a more
| streaming focused box (like an apple tv but by microsoft)
| and sell that to the parents while selling the beefy gaming
| one to the kids.
|
| I think the thing that sunk it was some Orwellian notion
| about the kinect. It's awesome tech, get a siri/alexa plus
| body tracking. The biggest downside being that MS's stance
| on privacy is 'peasants get no privacy'. At the time
| siri/alexa were still in their early stages and people were
| creeped out by them. Siri with eyes was extra repellent.
|
| Well that and gamers throwing a fit because they didn't
| want their gaming console to be useful to their parents and
| other non gamers ...
| hbn wrote:
| You're misrepresenting what people were actually upset
| about with the Xbox One's original plans leading up to
| launch. If they wanted to add that Kinect functionality,
| whatever, but they announced it in a state where the
| Kinect was REQUIRED and had to always be plugged in. And
| it wasn't just always-on motion-tracking sensors, but an
| always-on microphone. In addition to that, your Xbox had
| to do a call to home every 24 hours to make sure you were
| still allowed to play physical games you purchased. You
| couldn't buy or sell used games, or lend them to a
| friend.
|
| The DVR stuff wasn't a big issue for anyone, but it was
| emblematic of the fact that Microsoft didn't give a shit
| about gaming. Sony was already pulling ahead with
| exclusives people wanted by the end of the previous
| generation, and all Microsoft had to show for the next
| generation was a home entertainment system that had too
| much DRM and focused on their motion control gimmick at
| the point where everyone knew it was a fad that came and
| went in 2006 with the Wii. And on top of all this it was
| an extra $100 on top of the PS4's price.
|
| Saying gamers were mad because the system could be useful
| to their parents is incredibly disingenuous.
| mustacheemperor wrote:
| >Well that and gamers throwing a fit because they didn't
| want their gaming console to be useful to their parents
| and other non gamers ...
|
| I think it's worth revisiting the announcement. Gamers
| were upset because the launch presentation of the new
| console spent very little time talking about games. That
| presentation was followed by a Q&A with the notorious "we
| have a console for people without reliable internet, it's
| the xbox 360" quip. The "peasants get no privacy"
| attitude really felt like it was just part of a bigger
| "the peasants will buy what we say" attitude.
|
| I'm with you on the utility of the basic concept. I
| actually really enjoyed using the Kinect to control
| Netflix. There was a good concept buried in the xbone
| vision that I would still like to use today - but
| Microsoft fumbled the execution tremendously badly and in
| particular, did so in a way that did not show "good
| stewardship to gaming."
|
| On that note, the Kinect almost ended Rare as a
| studio...and the cool media features introduced with the
| Xbox One are now as dead as the Kinect.
| pdntspa wrote:
| Microsoft has sought to dominate the living room long
| before Xbox.... remember Windows Media Center? I don't
| know if it is still their strategy (seems like not by
| your post, I don't have an Xbox One S and my living room
| runs Kodi on Android TV) but it has been their intention
| for a while.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Windows Media Center is truly dead and all the TV-
| focused/Roku-competitive parts of the Xbox One were
| turned off years ago in OS changes. (Many were turned off
| _only months_ after that sad launch. Some of them were
| great features and there is reason to lament their loss
| in the massive turnaround.) The Series S /X successor
| consoles have never had any of those parts of the OS and
| the above comment that this "Xbox One living room
| debacle" being "recent" feels outdated at best.
|
| Microsoft seems to have given up on the living room
| entirely outside of gaming ambitions.
| Arrath wrote:
| Its funny, prior to getting a SmartTV I used my Xbox One
| basically as Microsoft imagined. Game console, dvd
| player, and box to run my streaming apps.
| 7952 wrote:
| I guess it could reduce the risk of another platform creating
| network effects.
| waboremo wrote:
| Xbox is Microsoft's only consumer division that has
| substantial revenue. Even consumer office brings in half of
| what Xbox does.
|
| Microsoft is making the right moves here slowly shifting away
| from hardware (no profit) into software in the gaming space,
| but it's going to take some more time to do so.
|
| Potentially it makes more sense to drop xcloud (huge black
| hole for the next ~10 years), to adhere to CMA's claims of
| them dominating the cloud gaming space, so they can continue
| with Game Pass (the part that actually matters for Xbox).
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| My personal opinion it it really stops Microsoft being able to
| fully compete with Sony. Sony did a good job of buying up game
| studios to make PlayStation exclusive games. Microsoft tries to
| get into the game and it appears at first glance they're
| prevented.
| shubb wrote:
| Remember that time meta set up a free vpn app with no meta
| branding so they could monitor traffic and upcoming rival apps
| in real time to copy their features and neuter them?
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onavo
|
| Onavo vpn
| cubefox wrote:
| Note that Microsoft has an extremely high operating margin of
| 40%, which indicates insufficient competition. Even Apple has
| "just" 30%. With all that money laying around, they can just
| gobble up anything but the biggest fish.
| kgwgk wrote:
| Different industries have different margins. Apple and
| Microsoft are not really comparable businesses.
| drawfloat wrote:
| You have to take quite a narrow view of the business world
| to say Apple and Microsoft aren't comparable. They might
| have different products, but it's not like Apple is a
| greengrocer.
| kgwgk wrote:
| 80% of Apple's revenue is from selling products and 20%
| from services.
|
| The gross margins on those segments are completely
| different - twice as large for services.
|
| Microsoft reports three segments with roughly the same
| size and similar margins.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| Apple is a hardware company.
|
| Microsoft is almost entirely a software company.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| xbox, surface, HID devices, hololens, ... microsoft is
| TRYING to be a hardware company, they just suck at it.
| fauxpause_ wrote:
| From a profit margin perspective they are wildly
| different. Amazon profits are mostly just AWS. Microsoft
| is, I think, driven by their enterprise software. Apple
| is, I think, more hardware and App Store.
|
| We shouldn't expect them to have similar margins.
| cubefox wrote:
| Nobody said we should, but they have.
| safog wrote:
| And so it's a meaningless correlation. Telsa has a 30%
| margin too. Do you want to lump them along with Apple and
| MSFT?
| cubefox wrote:
| This source says 15%:
| https://companiesmarketcap.com/tesla/operating-margin/
| edgyquant wrote:
| The entire argument behind capitalism is that high margins
| attract competition that drives those margins down towards
| zero. If that isn't happening, it's due to an environment
| that isn't competitive (e.g. too high a barrier to entry.)
| birdyrooster wrote:
| If the opposite were true, that low margins attract
| competition, then the margins would increase towards
| 100%. How do you tell if these companies are going
| towards 100% or 0%? Wouldn't we need to see a change over
| time? How do you account for businesses which are
| acquired during that time which affect their margins?
| 1980phipsi wrote:
| In the economic model of perfect competition, price
| equals marginal cost, so margins will be zero, as you
| say. Though you don't explicitly argue it, it is worth
| making clear that capitalism doesn't mean that the
| perfect competition model will always hold for all
| markets. There are plenty of reasons why monopolistic
| competition could occur, even in a strawman version of
| capitalism. People could pay attention to branding, for
| instance. Firms that spend more on branding might be able
| to maintain higher margins. So even in the strawman
| capitalism, margins could be high for reasons other than
| a lack of competition.
|
| In the real world the technology industry does tend to
| have higher margins than other industries. There might be
| perfectly normal explanations for that, such as network
| effects, but there are also government policies that have
| the effect of reducing competition. For instance,
| intellectual property laws reduce competition in order to
| attempt to encourage innovation. The strawman version of
| capitalism doesn't exist in the real world. Margins can
| remain high for some time.
|
| That being said, there are competitors for Microsoft's
| bread and butter products. If you want an alternative to
| Windows, try Linux. If you want an alternative to Office,
| try Open Office. For many users, however, they get a
| better experience with the Microsoft products than these
| alternatives, even though they are free. Microsoft has to
| keep making their products better than the alternatives
| or people will use others (though there are costs of
| switching and network effects that mean that MS probably
| doesn't need to have the absolute best product on the
| market in order for customers to keep using them).
| cubefox wrote:
| Microsoft has no real competitor for Office 365, it's
| basically free money for them.
| Spivak wrote:
| Realistically the competition is "not buying it." Nothing
| in o365 is business critical until you buy into the
| Microsoft world and make them so. They have solid
| competitors in every vertical and "but <alternative>
| isn't as good" is overblown since outside of Office and
| managing Windows (which is a problem of your own making)
| they're not best-in-class for much. People vastly prefer
| Dropbox and Slack when it's on offer. Their offerings are
| attractive because they're good enough and cheap. If you
| don't buy into overbearing Windows IT administration
| world, pick any other email provider, and buy Office
| licenses ad-hoc for people who care and everyone else
| gets LibreOffice you can just pretend they don't exist.
|
| Unless you go out of your way to buy cheap laptops the
| difference between macbooks and your favorite dell
| business longitude isn't as bad as you think.
| ukuina wrote:
| True for larger companies, but a whole bunch of SMBs use
| Google Workspace, and some larger players have both
| subscriptions.
| mbernstein wrote:
| Just to note - you're talking about economic profit
| (subtracting out opportunity cost) not accounting profit,
| which is what is being measured in these cases.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Just because we can't guarantee a perfectly competitive
| market doesn't mean the government can't try to ensure
| one. E.g. you mention Linux as a competitor to windows,
| yet the government itself is a huge buyer of windows and
| Microsoft products in general. A role of government
| should be setting up and ensuring as close to perfectly
| competitive markets as possible.
| 1980phipsi wrote:
| "A role of government should be setting up and ensuring
| as close to perfectly competitive markets as
| piasible.[sic]"
|
| Your argument is not that different from people who say
| things like "we don't have perfect competition, that is a
| market failure, the government must fix it". As I said
| before, perfect competition is a model. It isn't some
| utopian ideal. The argument as I phrase it is basically
| the Nirvana fallacy, and I don't think I'm
| mischaracterizing your views.
|
| I would be more sympathetic to arguments like: "anti-
| competitive corporate behavior, like the formation of
| monopolies or cartels or other means that reduce output
| and raises prices, is not socially optimal. The
| government should prevent such behavior"
|
| In other words, I think you adopt a position that tries
| to prove too much. This merger may be bad (or it may be
| good, I don't really know), but you don't have to rely on
| the argument that if competition isn't perfect then the
| government should step in in order to oppose it. That's
| not a good argument.
| bmicraft wrote:
| While I agree that governments shouldn't buy Microsoft
| products, it's not really a competition when nobody there
| aren't any companies trying to develop or sell linux as a
| client os for end-users.
| cubefox wrote:
| In what industry is a 40% operating margin considered
| normal? For comparison, Elsevier has an operating margin of
| 37%.
| kgwgk wrote:
| McDonalds has an operating margin over 40%. And for
| Altria is above 50%. And for Visa or CME Group above 60%.
|
| How are any of those things relevant for the
| comparability of the businesses of Apple and Microsoft
| anyway?
| brookst wrote:
| Wait, what? You expect software companies to have low
| margins?
|
| Apple's gross margin is about 40% because the marginal cost
| of hardware is somewhat expensive. Software companies
| typically gave gross margins of 65% or more, because the
| marginal cost of software is zero.
|
| This is an odd take.
| runako wrote:
| A focus on margins irrespective of industry leads to
| incorrect analysis. For example, look at Comcast, a company
| that truly operates as a monopoly/duopoly in most of its
| markets. It has an operating margin of 7.6%.
|
| On the other hand, Exxon Mobil has an operating margin of
| nearly 20% despite selling an undifferentiated commodity in a
| market with many well-capitalized competitors. (They are not
| the only one: ConocoPhillips also sports an operating margin
| in the range of 20%.)
|
| The particulars of a market often drive margins more than
| does the competition.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| That's why the person you're replying to didn't look at
| margins irrespective of industry. They compared Microsoft
| to Apple.
| intelVISA wrote:
| I'm all for free market competition etc., although in truth
| I've never seen it being 'good for innovation' quite as
| people describe.
|
| The first big player in a space e.g. Atlassian just acquires
| any competition and guts it. Sure, that's as free market as
| it gets (ignoring anti-trust?) but I don't see the benefit to
| the consumer.
|
| Or, at the other end, as a Canadian, UK taxpayer (and many
| others) your money goes to keep afloat gov't subsidized
| startups that could never compete in the free market
| otherwise... is this beneficial as well?
|
| I just write ANSI C so maybe it's all lost on me somewhere.
| AlchemistCamp wrote:
| > _Atlassian just acquires any competition and guts it_
|
| Did Atlassian "gut" Trello or Bitbucket? I was using both
| before Atlassian acquired them and don't fully understand
| what you're talking about.
|
| Can you elaborate a bit more about your theory?
| sefrost wrote:
| Which subsidized startups are you referring to?
| kypro wrote:
| I don't think size is really relevant to the issue at all, it's
| simply the general anti-competitive practises that size has
| enabled these companies to pursue as aggressively as needed to
| crush all competition. What Microsoft is doing with bundling
| for example is far more destructive to competition than
| acquisitions.
|
| I think what we need is more nuanced regulation to give smaller
| competitors room to compete with big tech products, if this
| were the case then who cares about their size or acquisitions?
| So long as smaller competitors can always rise and challenge
| the big players then size is fine since it would just correlate
| to quality and value, rather than an ability and willingness to
| crush competition.
|
| The question to be asking is if a practise is unduly
| restricting competition. Having a market share of 95% is fine
| in my eyes so long as there is competition.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| So what would be better then? Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei,
| Bytedance?
|
| At least FB doesn't promote stupid challenges that send people
| to the hospital with cracked skulls like TikTok.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Yeah, I cannot see this merger being a net benefit for
| consumers. It reads completely like Microsoft just flexing its
| financial muscles gained entirely from things unrelated to
| gaming, and using that money to take over the industry in the
| long-term.
|
| Sure, they did sign on their games with services like Geforce
| Now for 10 years and bring Call of Duty to Nintendo consoles.
| However, these all seem like short-term theatre to make
| everything look nice.
|
| First of all, the reason why Microsoft games were not on
| Geforce Now was because Microsoft PULLED them from it [1]. And
| considering that Activision-Blizzard is (allegedly) worth $69
| billion, I don't believe that they couldn't bring their games
| onto Nintendo platforms if they saw a market there. Seems like
| Microsoft is just making up imaginary markets to be able to say
| "look at all these people who will get Call of Duty because of
| US".
|
| [1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/20/21228792/nvidia-
| geforce-n...
| gigel82 wrote:
| In general I agree with you; but in this particular case, this
| is a "win" for Sony who can continue with their vast array of
| exclusives unhindered, and a "loss" for gaming customers due to
| that.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I don't think extra large tech companies are uniquely capable
| of any meaningful innovation. Ie. there's no benefit to
| everyone by having them exist at that size.
|
| In fact, I think their size makes them uniquely incapable of
| innovation. All they can do is push everyone down to stay on
| top.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I imagine hardware innovation these days requires huge
| amounts of money.
| beebeepka wrote:
| But you mostly need the money, not the headcount
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Where is the money going to come from? The large tech
| companies are the ones with the best cash flows.
| beebeepka wrote:
| They give the money to smaller teams and swallow them
| upon success. Isn't that how it's been working for a
| while?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I am confused what we are conversing about. Waterluvian
| wrote the big tech companies are not capable of
| innovation, so my response was the funding still needs to
| come from them.
|
| Whether or not it is a large group of employees or a
| small group of employees doing the innovating is a
| separate matter, but the need for huge cash flows is
| there (if my assertion is correct).
| beebeepka wrote:
| Then we agree. I must have missed something as I was
| finishing a bottle of 7.5% alcohol beer.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I recently learned about Chimay.
|
| https://chimay.com/
| kartayyar wrote:
| In other words, a shallow big == bad without taking specfic
| context into consideration?
|
| Imo I want competition and choice as a consumer. This basically
| sets things up so that consoles become a non competitive market
| because Xbox lacks exclusives that Sony has.
| AraceliHarker wrote:
| Have you seen the press release from CMA? They only mention
| cloud gaming and game pass price increase as the reasons to
| oppose Microsoft's acquisition of AB, right?
| pyrale wrote:
| > Edit. Seeing a lot of comments saying UK couldn't function
| without Microsoft which kind of supports my point.
|
| The replies advocating for Microsoft to strong-arm a country
| into submission are chilling.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| This is especially pertinent to Microsoft which wants video
| games for their own hardware while Sony might have exclusives
| Destiny 2 is still on all platforms. Not to say that Sony is a
| perfect example in every situation and they do have exclusives.
| ronnier wrote:
| This will make it easier for large Chinese companies to rule
| over you that can "snuff out entire startup sectors with loss-
| leading products".
| 3327 wrote:
| [dead]
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > Edit. Seeing a lot of comments saying UK couldn't function
| without Microsoft which kind of supports my point.
|
| Yup.
|
| The NHS (UK National Health Service) is Microsoft's biggest
| single account for Office/Office365 and probably other stuff
| too.
|
| So I guess add on other parts of UK gov and yeah, "couldn't
| function without Microsoft" is not far from the truth.
|
| I mean, some might argue that the UK government hasn't
| functioned much since 2016/Brexit anyway, but that's another
| story. :)
| Tycho wrote:
| Plus, as we saw recently with Twitter, they are massively over
| staffed and depriving other companies of workers.
| adql wrote:
| A lot of people want to see it purely on hope that under MS
| Actiblizzard will be less shit of a company. Which is...
| optimistic.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| It's very optimistic. Even under new leadership the creative
| talent that Blizzard has lost over the last 10 years is not
| coming back. Microsoft themselves aren't particularly good at
| picking talent either - see the Halo Infinite/343 Studios
| debacle. _Maybe_ there would be less of a push for player-
| hostile monetization, but I wouldn 't count on it. The people
| who made and executed those decisions at Activision/Blizzard
| aren't magically going away either.
| bgorman wrote:
| The logic doesn't make sense, and Microsoft also doesn't have a
| market power advantage here.
|
| The Xbox Series X/S has been a bit of a boondoggle and Sony is
| vastly outselling Microsoft this generation. Not to mention the
| existence of Nintendo, Valve and other PC gaming stores. The
| argument that this would weaken competition for gaming consoles
| is laughable.
|
| Sony and Nintendo have exclusive games to gain an advantage.
| Now an American company wants to do the same thing, and they
| are blocked.
|
| American companies are being put at a competitive disadvantage
| due to ridiculous anti-trust interpretations. Basically the CMA
| and FTC are trying to prevent any American tech company from
| acquiring another tech company for political points at home.
| How did we get to this point?
|
| It is extremely dangerous to throw logic out the window, as
| this results in bureaucrats picking winners and losers.
| izacus wrote:
| > hey wield huge power and can snuff out entire startup sectors
| with loss-leading products.
|
| More importantly, they're becoming complacent and lazy, using
| their legal and financial clout to kill competition, not
| product improvements.
|
| This is why China is so scary - their companies have started
| being very competitive to US behemoths which have been
| buying/killing their competition for decade(s) now.
| paganel wrote:
| > This is why China is so scary - their companies have
| started being very competitive
|
| When it comes to tech regulation the Chinese authorities have
| at least a 2-3 year advantage against the US/UK, notice how
| the likes of Alibaba and Tencent have been brought
| (relatively) down compared to what was expected of them 5
| years ago.
| panick21_ wrote:
| Lets all celebrate dictatorships not wanting other powerful
| entities in their country.
| eunos wrote:
| Unironically
| paganel wrote:
| You make a good point, that is which institution has more
| legitimacy inside a de facto authoritarian state? The
| state itself and its authoritarian leaders? Or a private
| corporation that got so big as to "submerge" the state?
| (for the latter case think Samsung and South Korea, if
| South Korea had kept its 1970s-1980s state-policies).
| izacus wrote:
| No, let's all celebrate market competition, the most
| critical part of a functioning economy. Chinese companies
| aren't competitive due to CCP or authoritarian regime,
| but they're competitive because they're the underdogs on
| western markets and can't just curbstomp the competition
| with lawyers and DRM like US corporations can in their
| markets.
|
| So they're forced to compete on price, quality and
| features (to some extent - it's not like they're not
| getting daddy Xis helping hand). Just like companies in
| other healthy capitalist markets which haven't completely
| broke due to consolidation.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Chinese companies aren't competitive due to CCP or
| authoritarian regime, but they're competitive because
| they're the underdogs on western markets
|
| China has been accused multiple times of assisting their
| companies with absurd amounts of government subsidies
| (leading to at least Europe and the US enacting counter
| tariffs), as well as using government and private
| industrial espionage and hacking campaigns to clone
| Western products.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| What major power doesn't do this?
| izacus wrote:
| Absolutely, and that's toxic to the market the same way
| as US corporate consolidation is.
| wesapien wrote:
| PRC "progress" was a form of control. CCP basically
| handed everyone "rings of power" to rule over them. All
| their wealth is meant to be kept inside because that's
| control of the nation. Imagine if they didn't have
| currency controls, every rich person there would dump the
| Yuan for other currencies and overseas real estate.
| Meanwhile, all the inflated properties in the PRC will
| drop significantly. Unrest or instability is not good for
| CCP.
| izacus wrote:
| Which is all besides the point - the point is: you need
| market competition for capitalism to work. As soon as
| competition is broken, your economy starts stagnating and
| other incumbents start eating away at it.
| capableweb wrote:
| Countries (or their leadership) can be good and bad at
| the same time, for different reasons.
|
| China - Awful way of treating people, illusion of
| democracy, but at least they reign in huge companies.
|
| US - Democracy but companies wield huge power. Doesn't
| seem to care about people's health much.
|
| Many European countries - Huge focus on caring about
| public healthcare, companies under control but innovation
| stifled a lot of times
|
| Same goes for basically every country, and it's important
| to be able to see the good and bad at the same time, to
| have a bit perspective. No country is 100% good, nor is
| any country 100% bad.
| pipes wrote:
| Kidnapping CEOs who dare speak out against your regime, you
| see this as an advantage?
| paganel wrote:
| In general I don't have much sympathy for the CEOs of
| multi-multi-billion-dollar companies, if at all. And
| considering the current dire political and economic
| climate, including in many Western countries, I think
| that that view of mine is shared by many.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| People like paganel are why you should keep an eye on
| politics even if you hate everyone or are basically
| satisfied with the status quo. There're always those who
| has no problem with political violence as long as the
| violent are on their side. Be watchful.
| paganel wrote:
| I'm going to quote Chateaubriand, talking about the
| French of his time: "the French instinctively go where
| the power is; they don't love freedom at all; equality
| alone is their only idol. And equality and despotism have
| secret connections between them. Seen under that light,
| Napoleon's rule drew its power from the very hearts of
| the French people" (badly translated by me on a small
| iPhone while reading Compagnon's _The Antimoderns_ )
|
| As such, it isn't me or people thinking like me that you
| should fear (i.e. people who quote Chateaubriand to a
| total techie stranger on the web), you should fear the
| "quintessential" French (or Westerner, in today's age)
| that goes "where the power is" by instinct (on this La
| Boetie was right centuries ago). That is if you people
| really care about your freedom.
| pipes wrote:
| So which CEOs would you blame for the dire economic
| climate?
| brookst wrote:
| Never confuse morality and efficiency, even when tray ng
| to make a moral point.
| jjallen wrote:
| The methods definitely aren't great but the effects may
| be. Although some of the goals the government has are not
| really about the populous and more about limiting private
| sector power vis a vis the government and not the
| populous.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| As an American I think I and most of my fellow citizens
| would be better off if CEOs started getting tossed in
| jail.
| pipes wrote:
| What CEOs do you want sent to jail? And what were their
| crimes?
| kevingadd wrote:
| One idea: PG&E has killed lots of California residents
| through neglect, not to mention all the damage caused by
| fires that were their responsibility. Someone ought to
| pay for that other than the tax payers, if only to make
| an example.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| Let's start here:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_H._Shaw
| pipes wrote:
| Did he do something criminal or was this a bad accident?
| Would you prefer if your government could just decide who
| to toss in jail (which is what the CCP does). I'd prefer
| I had the right to a trial. Also a judiciary that is
| separate to from the rest of government to protect the
| population from politically motivated prosecutions.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > Did he do something criminal or was this a bad
| accident?
|
| Even is something is an accident, gross negligence is
| still a thing and may be criminal depending on the
| consequences of said negligence.
| capableweb wrote:
| Was this proven in one way or another? You speak of it as
| it's 100% sure it happened, but I haven't seen anything
| but rumors about this, you wouldn't spread hearsay on HN
| right?
| prewett wrote:
| Given that the CCP frequently "disappears" its nationals
| that it has some problem with, I think giving the CCP the
| benefit of the doubt is unwise and harmful. Given it's
| demonstrated pattern over many years, I think we can
| safely assume malintent.
|
| Nothing is 100% sure, anyway, and the CCP does these
| things in secret to provide it deniability.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/04/tycoon-
| xiao-ji...
|
| https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/china-
| billi...
| 015a wrote:
| Microsoft is maybe the _only_ big tech organization that
| feels like they 're still actively trying to out-innovate
| their size. They invested in OpenAI (not acquired; invested)
| then weeks later made substantial improvements to Bing. They
| made a concept hardware device 10 years ago (the Courier),
| then finally made it real (it's not great, but that's beside
| the point). They're possibly the single largest funder of
| insanely critical open source software projects; Kubernetes,
| TypeScript, VSCode, etc. They acquired Github then
| practically speaking left them alone to continue being a
| really high quality product, while simultaneously investing
| in internal direct competitors (Azure DevOps). They released
| Loop a few weeks ago; now they're going after Notion.
|
| You can argue that they're leveraging M365 and their
| enterprise contracts to out-innovate smaller competitors like
| Slack, Notion, etc. Yeah, ok; I don't love it. But I really
| can't help but feel: At least they're doing it. At least
| they're releasing new products that don't totally suck. I
| literally can't think of one thing Google has released in the
| past five years that left a fingerprint on the world.
| Facebook is a similar story. Apple is a very different
| company, but its not dissimilar: M1 was incredible, but if
| you put that aside (because, really, the past three years has
| been "M1 Catchup" for them) the iPhone is the same thing it
| was four years ago, the iPad is the same, the Watch is the
| same, the software is overwhelmingly the same, I guess they
| have a new Savings Account (when companies start running out
| of ideas to innovate, they turn to financial engineering).
|
| Microsoft is a cool company, and I'll die on that hill. I'm
| not happy with everything they do. I think the entire Windows
| division leadership needs to be gutted and replaced, and they
| need to think long and hard about what Windows looks like for
| the next 10 years (and maybe they're already doing that!).
| But putting that aside, even considering Microsoft's very
| light anti-competitiveness, I'd take them over the rest of
| big tech nowadays. They're mostly just lame ducks.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > I think the entire Windows division leadership needs to
| be gutted and replaced, and they need to think long and
| hard about what Windows looks like for the next 10 years
| (and maybe they're already doing that!).
|
| I think the reason Windows is getting crappier is the same
| reason that Microsoft is doing everything else in your list
| - they're transitioning to an SaaS/services company and
| leveraging their existing strengths/monopolies to elbow
| their way into various SaaS markets (see: Microsoft Teams
| shipping "free" with O365). Changing windows to respect
| users again would require changing the whole corporate
| culture you are praising, not just the Windows division. In
| my opinion what's happening to Windows is entirely
| consistent with everything else Microsoft is doing, not
| some aberration.
| TheKarateKid wrote:
| Microsoft tried moving away from legacy Windows with UWP.
| The long term plan was probably for UWP to replace core
| Windows with that.
|
| Windows will be around for at least a few more decades
| until everything is a web app. But leadership under Nadella
| knows the clock is ticking and that's why they've moved
| their focus to making Office 365 (Office/OneDrive/Teams)
| and Azure their bread and butter.
| enedil wrote:
| Kubernetes is from Google.
| 015a wrote:
| Its not Google's project anymore. They're still the
| largest contributor, but Red Hat, VMWare, and Microsoft
| are all massive contributors [1]
|
| [1] https://k8s.devstats.cncf.io/d/9/companies-
| table?orgId=1&var...
| izacus wrote:
| That's all great, but...
|
| > Microsoft is a cool company, and I'll die on that hill.
|
| "cool" companies stagnate. Remember, Microsoft was that
| "cool" company who left us with rottin IE6 until
| competition came.
|
| So let me channel Ballmer, leader of said cool company:
| COMPETITION, COMPETITION, COMPETITION, COMPETITION,
| COMPETITION, COMPETITION. That makes our world better.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| While morally I can agree with it, from a pragmatic and gaming
| perspective I think this is terrible since it will 100% lead to
| some games not being available in the UK.
| kmlx wrote:
| > it will 100% lead to some games not being available in the UK
|
| beyond the hype and the takes, it's probably 0%.
|
| > FTC suing to block Microsoft's $69bn Activision Blizzard
| acquisition
|
| what are they going to do, ban games from the US?
| ricardobayes wrote:
| Why? What other realistic scenario do you see playing out
| here? In my mind there is no question the merger of the US
| companies will go through. They will either create some other
| entities to make this ruling work or simply make Activision
| games unavailable in the UK.
| lunchladydoris wrote:
| Why? Revenge? I would think that all parties involved prefer
| money over revenge.
| mrkwse wrote:
| Well it depends on how Microsoft's accountants manage the
| maths:
|
| Hypothetically, if MS + Activision - UK > MS + UK -
| Activision (assuming it's only blocked in UK), it's plausible
| that Microsoft withdraws from UK to pursue its business with
| the merger everywhere else. The UK is a decent sized market,
| but it's far from the biggest.
| DashAnimal wrote:
| There is another possibility here, which is MS + Activision
| - Cloud Gaming > MS + Cloud Gaming.
|
| I wonder if MSFT is considering that at all. They obviously
| have the numbers, but I wouldn't be surprised if cloud
| gaming hasn't seen the growth they expected and it makes
| sense to kill it entirely.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| That was also the thought process of many smaller companies
| to implement EU data privacy rules. It was easier to stop
| serving the market instead of complying.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| I personally don't see how it can happen but of course I'm
| not a corporate lawyer. The parent companies merge so they
| might keep up some local branch to support the UK market, but
| how would that be connected to the parent company? What level
| of separation is needed, in the UK's eyes? Will the UK
| Activision branch workers allowed to work with Microsoft US?
| Or would that be seen as evading the ruling?
| latency-guy2 wrote:
| I've been petty enough to cut off quite big deals in my life,
| I wouldn't expect the moral outrage company that Microsoft
| harbors to not do something similar. As we know, MSFT did
| remove Twitter from their ad network due to API pricing
| changes, price of business is cheap compared to the benefits
| they got there, so that's quite a ridiculous cut of spending
| to say the least.
|
| Then again, we know they operate in countries fundamentally
| opposed to their "corporate values". So who knows.
| dzonga wrote:
| maybe the CMA worded it wrongly in terms of cloud gaming.
|
| but the gist of it remains the same. Microsoft wants to weaken
| Sony's exclusive moat by buying their own big property to make it
| an exclusive down the line, thereby either increasing the value
| proposition of Game Pass, or Xbox cloud gaming anywhere.
|
| by now Microsoft already knows they're not going to catch up to
| Sony or Nintendo in terms of console sales.
|
| game pass is probably one of the best deals in entertainment
| though, and by that I mean all forms of entertainment whether
| sports, film, music etc.
| Laaas wrote:
| How come the UK has the ability to block two American companies
| from merging? Why can't they just ignore the CMA?
| kmlx wrote:
| > If the merging parties were to ignore the CMA's decision they
| could face significant legal and financial consequences. For
| example, the CMA could fine the companies, force them to unwind
| the merger, or take legal action to enforce its decision.
| Additionally, ignoring the CMA's decision could damage the
| companies' reputation and relationships with UK customers,
| regulators, and stakeholders.
| etempleton wrote:
| How does the CMA reconcile the fact that Sony also has a cloud
| streaming service and it is larger than Microsoft? If this makes
| Xbox too big doesn't it mean that PlayStation is also too big?
| And how is anyone to compete against Sony if they can't grow
| their own exclusive content?
| htag wrote:
| > And how is anyone to compete against Sony if they can't grow
| their own exclusive content?
|
| 1. Xbox Live/Game Pass is still a better service, and one of
| the best deals in gaming.
|
| 2. Microsoft already owns (or has owned in the past) tons of
| gaming IP. Halo, Minecraft, and Bethesda are huge names.
| Microsoft Game Studios was used to publish some fantastic games
| in the past.
|
| 3. Cloud streaming is largely theoretical at this point.
| There's potential, but will customers choose a $20-40/mo
| subscription instead of buying a ~$500 console every ~5 years.
| I'm doubtful. The math says it's a bad deal for console gamers
| and worse performance for the top 1% of the market. Sony's lead
| here probably isn't the killing blow for Xbox.
|
| 4. Microsoft could always make it's own games, instead of
| acquiring them.
|
| 5. Microsoft has some benefits with owning both platforms Xbox
| and Windows that they have never been able to fully capitalize
| on.
|
| I own an Xbox, a PS5, a Switch, a Steam Deck, a high powered
| gaming desktop, several arcade games, and basically all the
| retro consoles.
| etempleton wrote:
| > Cloud streaming is largely theoretical at this point.
| There's potential, but will customers choose a $20-40/mo
| subscription instead of buying a ~$500 console every ~5
| years. I'm doubtful. The math says it's a bad deal for
| console gamers and worse performance for the top 1% of the
| market. Sony's lead here probably isn't the killing blow for
| Xbox.But that is
|
| But that is the CMAs argument. That this will make Microsoft
| too dominant in the cloud streaming space.
| rvz wrote:
| Very unsurprising. [0] This is just basic horizontal integration
| and this is the right decision to block this deal.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33518102
| samwillis wrote:
| It's important to take this decision in the context of the CMA's
| wider investigation into "Mobile browsers and cloud gaming"
|
| https://www.gov.uk/cma-cases/mobile-browsers-and-cloud-gamin...
|
| They intended to investigate the cloud/mobile gaming and App
| Stores, plus look at mobile browser competition (or lack their of
| on iOS).
|
| Sadly Apple, clearly feeling threatened by it, forced it to be
| stopped on a fairly stupid technicality. Hopefully they will be
| able to relaunch it soon.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/technology/apple-wins-appeal-against...
|
| If this decision re Microsoft+Activision is anything to go by,
| the wider investigation and potential regulation coming from it
| could have been very impactful.
| rjh29 wrote:
| [flagged]
| shubb wrote:
| Probably good for Microsoft- the acquisition was agreed at bubble
| prices, and driven by copying a business that hasn't worked out.
|
| SEA Ltd had great promise in 2021 - they made a hyper popular
| game and used those revenues and user mindshare to branch out
| into ecomerce, financial services and all sorts. It was seem as
| an important part to cradle snatch Gen A before they signed up to
| meta and amazon.
|
| With metaverse ideas also peaking it seemed like a must do
| strategy for every conglomerate to get into games. Amazon did
| too!
|
| In 2022, SEA and Meta are not healthy. Thier plan to invest
| heavily and get paid later does not make sense in a higher rate
| environment where the payoff is less than you'd make saving your
| money in bonds.
|
| Microsoft has a long term interest in games, but it doesn't need
| to supercharge it. There are better uses for the 70 billion.
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| Cloud Gaming is always going to fall on its face, like Stadia,
| for one simple reason. Latency. It's bad enough when latency
| interacts with multi-kilobyte telemetry messages in the client-
| rendered model. Cloud Gaming replaces that messaging with pumping
| multiple megabytes of video data to one's screen.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| Do you have a lot of experience with this? I have used GeForce
| Now to play Fortnite and other games for years and I think it
| works great. I've also used PS Now to play Bloodborne which is
| very sensitive to feel and timing and that works well too, it
| actually plays better there than it did on the original PS4.
| dopeboy wrote:
| Admittedly I was coming in with the same perspective as OP so
| I wasn't aware you could smoothly play triple A titles via
| streaming. No catch, no hang ups?
| smolder wrote:
| The catch as stated is slightly worse input latency. You
| can still win games. It might feel fine to you. But even a
| practically imperceptible 10-20ms of extra input lag
| compared to the gamers with their own hardware puts you at
| an unavoidable statistical disadvantage. You will be 10ms
| too late with aiming your shots some percentage of the
| time.
| beebeepka wrote:
| What about latency, though. Fortnite may be possible but
| Quake or StarCraft? Sure, on the lowest of the lowest of
| tiers. People used to say 24 fps was great, too. Only took us
| 20 years for the masses to catch up.
|
| Anything below 120 feels sluggish to me. At 60 fps local, I
| move my mouse and the picture is changed after what feels
| like an eternity. Can't imagine cloud rendered 60 being
| better. In fact, it's guaranteed to be worse.
| planede wrote:
| There is already inherent latency in networked games. Cloud
| gaming could somewhat compensate by having the servers
| running the game clients close to the game hosts.
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| The display still has to be rendered on the player's
| screen for them to react to it. Cloud gaming only
| increases the volume of data coming down to the client so
| it seems logical any latency issues would be amplified,
| even if using a top video codec.
| beebeepka wrote:
| I am talking about input latency. The cloud solutions
| cannot compensate for it unless they start rendering all
| possible frames all the time which makes zero sense,
| nevermind being impractical to borderline impossible
| right now.
|
| Read carefully gpm's comment, or, I don't know, start
| playing games? It really helps
| gpm wrote:
| Fast paced networked games typically solved that by
| running a local simulation ahead of the server. The
| button you clicked looks depressed the instant you click
| it, not once the server knows about it. In FPS style
| games your character typically starts walking forwards
| the instant you press the forwards key, and you shoot the
| instant you click, not when the server finds out about
| it.
|
| This has weird effects. Each player is actually playing
| in a slightly different world. You might see yourself
| hitting something and they might see themselves blocking
| the shot, and only one of you can be right. The different
| worlds will retroactively correct themselves to be
| consistent in some form or another (depending on the game
| it might be that the person shooting is always correct,
| or it might be that the person blocking is always
| correct, or it might be that whoever's packets reached
| the server first is correct, or really some complex
| combination of all of the above). The weird effects are
| worthwhile because people are really sensitive to latency
| in response to their inputs.
|
| Even in slow placed games that use simpler networking
| models, I'm pretty sure the UI is basically always local.
| For example you might press the button that says "do the
| thing" and see the button style into it's "pressed
| state", but the server decides that the thing doer is
| dead before that button press reaches the server, so it
| ignores that button press.
| chandler5555 wrote:
| moving the latency to the player client just makes
| everything feel terrible. its like playing in mud because
| your actions take 50ms-100ms of time to show up on your
| screen
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| The most competitive games in existence are all online games
| that suffer from the same latency issues a cloud gaming service
| would. They seem to get along fine even though they require
| much more precise movement than the types of games that
| gamepass users would play.
| beebeepka wrote:
| But moving these games to the cloud is adding more problems
| on top without fixing any of the latency issues
| MikusR wrote:
| There are games that on Geforce now ultimate tier have lower
| latency than playing locally on console.
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| *reported latency
|
| Not saying reported is unequal to actual on that system, just
| pointing out the reality, a cloud gaming vendor is saying
| "this is out latency"
| jerrygenser wrote:
| Will this prevent the merger from happening in other markets too?
| jalev wrote:
| No. It's only relevant in the UK. If other regulators want to
| go forward with it then they can.
| paol wrote:
| That's not how it works. Companies with global presence (like
| these 2) need to have regulatory permission in every
| jurisdiction where they operate. If a jurisdiction forbids
| the merger then they would no longer be able to operate
| there.
|
| Consequently any regulator in charge of a sufficiently
| important market has de-facto veto power globally.
| paganel wrote:
| And if anything I don't expect EU regulators to be more
| lenient than the British ones.
| M2Ys4U wrote:
| Have the Commission _approved_ this takeover, or have
| they just not made a decision yet?
|
| Because it could just be a matter of the CMA being the
| first to say no...
| drumhead wrote:
| No, but the EU and US regulators will look at the Uk's
| reasoning for blocking the bid and it may influence their own
| decisions.
| dustedcodes wrote:
| Honest question, how does this deal make any financial sense to
| Microsoft if the plan wasn't eventually to implement anti-
| competitive practices much later down the line? Just buying
| Activision and then continue to run it as if they were neutral
| surely makes no sense. That's clearly not why they want to buy
| them.
|
| I am glad that this deal has been blocked. In fact Microsoft is
| already too big. It shows in their products.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Microsoft said that it wouldn't have an incentive to withold
| games from other platforms in 2021 when they acquired ZeniMax.
|
| > _" [Microsoft] submits that Microsoft has strong incentives
| to continue making ZeniMax games available for rival consoles
| (and their related storefronts)."_
|
| 2023/01: Hi-Fi Rush is exclusive to Xbox and Microsoft Windows.
|
| 2023/05: Redfall is exclusive to Xbox and Microsoft Windows.
|
| 2023/09: Starfield is exclusive to Xbox and Microsoft Windows.
|
| So yeah, I'm gonna err on the side of "they'd probably restrict
| a lot of games afterwards". Maybe some big existing properties
| like Call of Duty might be available, much like Minecraft, but
| I don't foresee Microsoft-ABK being a win for competition.
| etempleton wrote:
| Microsoft also owns Minecraft and they put that everywhere. For
| Microsoft it is all about GamePass. They want to be the Netflix
| of games, but to do that they need a large library of games on
| their service that people want to play to make it a no-brainer
| subscription.
| dustedcodes wrote:
| > They want to be the Netflix of games, but to do that they
| need a large library of games
|
| You don't need to buy Activision for that to happen. Netflix
| hasn't bought Universal or MGM. They purchase the rights to
| offer movies on their platform and at the same time produce
| their own content via their own production. Also Netflix
| doesn't own the hardware. That makes it very different to
| Microsoft, who own the hardware, the platform which you speak
| of (game pass) and also wants to own the production
| companies. This stinks of anti-competitive behaviour from
| miles if you ask me and is nothing like Netflix.
| caskstrength wrote:
| > You don't need to buy Activision for that to happen.
| Netflix hasn't bought Universal or MGM. They purchase the
| rights to offer movies on their platform and at the same
| time produce their own content via their own production.
|
| I think Blizzard infamously refused to release their games
| on any other online distribution platform besides their in-
| house battle.net launcher. Don't know how it is with other
| Activision titles, but the only way to get Diablo 4 in MS
| library of games is apparently to buy the whole company.
| bagacrap wrote:
| Netflix isn't very profitable. If you have to license
| content then the content owner is going to continuously
| squeeze you for as much of your profit as possible
| (especially when direct competitors crop up --- and there's
| no shortage of Hulus out there trying to eat Netflix's
| cake).
| etempleton wrote:
| You do if you want day and date releases. And Amazon bought
| MGM and Netflix pays for exclusives regularly.
|
| The video game space has always been about exclusives.
| Nintendo publishes no where else. Sony just started to
| publish on PC for some games. What is the difference?
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| > how does this deal make any financial sense to Microsoft if
| the plan wasn't eventually to implement anti-competitive
| practices much later down the line?
|
| It makes perfect sense. These huge companies have a lot of
| unused capital, which they have to find productive uses for.
| Acquisitions in markets they already have competencies in are a
| rather obvious way to make use of it.
|
| Internal R&D and launching new products is the best use of this
| capital (as it's the most tax efficient), but it's difficult to
| infinitely scale that spending efficiently (but acquisitions
| can effectively be one way of scaling this over the long term).
|
| The alternative is dividends, or the much more tax efficient
| stock buy back. But long term, acquisitions are better for
| shareholders.
| coldpie wrote:
| > how does this deal make any financial sense to Microsoft if
| the plan wasn't eventually to implement anti-competitive
| practices much later down the line
|
| I'm also not a fan of this deal, but I think this is a good
| question worth an answer. I think you'd need to suggest exactly
| what practices they may want to implement.
|
| For example it's not hard to see why they would continue to
| want to put COD on PlayStation systems: that brings in a ton of
| money. You can imagine a world where yanking it helps Xbox, but
| I don't think that's an inevitable result; would they really
| want to give up $X Billion in revenue from PlayStation if that
| only brings in $Y Million in new Xbox sales? Obviously it all
| depends on the numbers, but it's an example of why they can
| still benefit from this transaction without implementing anti-
| competitive practices.
| [deleted]
| gtm1260 wrote:
| Does anyone else think its crazy to unwind these acquisitions
| years afterwards? Where the companies have already been operating
| as a single entity for years?
| endianswap wrote:
| What are you talking about? The deal hasn't closed yet AND was
| only announced a year ago.
| runako wrote:
| Microsoft has to be calculating whether to (temporarily) pull out
| from the UK as a result of this.
|
| Their sales there are in the neighborhood of $5B annually (~2% of
| their overall run rate). Add a guess of $500m for Activision's UK
| sales for a total of $5.5B.
|
| The hit to sales would be temporary; the UK government would
| eventually capitulate as their citizens revolt at not being able
| to buy Windows or Office. (Yes, there are other options but a
| sudden loss of access to Microsoft products would be
| devastating.)
|
| Based on the numbers, it's not clear to me that the UK has the
| leverage to stop this merger. If they were still part of the EU,
| this calculus wouldn't begin to make sense.
| seatac76 wrote:
| MS cannot possibly do this, it would mean giving up any
| business with NATO. It's insane to me that a game studio
| acquisition gets such emotionally charged responses.
| runako wrote:
| > MS cannot possibly do this
|
| They obviously can. They don't operate in every country in
| the world, and there is nothing forcing them to operate in
| the UK. It would be irresponsible not to consider a move like
| this weighed against the relatively small contribution the UK
| makes to their global revenue.
|
| > giving up any business with NATO
|
| I am suggesting that they have to be weighing temporary loss
| of the entire UK market; losing direct purchases by NATO
| would presumably be smaller than the entire UK market.
|
| This isn't emotional at all. I am just suggesting that it has
| to be something they are considering as an option for
| completing the merger that their executives believe is
| important. Relatively speaking: they are willing to spend 14
| years of their UK sales to buy Activision, so presumably they
| think it's important.
| segasaturn wrote:
| I highly doubt that Microsoft is going to go nuclear to acquire
| ABK. I don't think this merger is do or die for them. It would
| also do irreparable harm to their brands, including the UK Xbox
| owners who would no longer be able to play their games!
| justeleblanc wrote:
| Don't be absurd. Microsoft and AB decided themselves to make
| their deal conditional on the CMA's approval. They're not going
| to pull out of the UK market. I'm amazed that this kind of take
| rises to the top of the comments.
| d3ckard wrote:
| That would be a country/corpo war and too cyberpunk to my
| taste. I don't agree with the decision, but this is not the way
| to solve this.
| runako wrote:
| That's the interesting thing here. Unlike recent regulatory
| actions by the EU, there doesn't appear to be a solution
| provided other than to let the UK CMA make business strategy
| decisions for Microsoft.
|
| I don't think it is necessarily how Microsoft will proceed,
| but it would be irresponsible for them not to consider such
| an approach.
|
| I also do think the CMA is overplaying its hand; sooner or
| later they will make a decision like this and a company will
| pull out of their market. Alone, they simply don't have the
| economic heft to regulate global companies domiciled outside
| their borders.
| gigel82 wrote:
| No.
|
| But I'd absolutely love to see one of the big guys try this, it
| would be super interesting to watch.
| worrycue wrote:
| > their citizens revolt at not being able to buy Windows or
| Office.
|
| The UK will probably allow those to be sold.
|
| If MS refuse to sell them, the politicians will just spin it as
| Microsoft vs the UK and get everyone worked up over
| "sovereignty". Maybe even fund and promote a standardised Linux
| Desktop distribution to replace Windows ... which has a chance
| to spread in popularity worldwide.
|
| Either way, Microsoft might be jeopardising future sales of its
| products in the UK by going on the offensive. It might also
| make other countries' governments warily of the company and
| impacting sales in those countries too.
|
| It would leaves the market wide open for their competitors to
| claim without any resistance from Microsoft as well.
| runako wrote:
| > The UK will probably allow those to be sold.
|
| Fair! Playing it out...if the UK allowed Microsoft products
| to be sold, but not products from the gaming division, that
| also might cause consumer unrest. Other than fines and/or
| preventing sales, there aren't all that many sanctions
| available to regulators in a situation like this.
|
| > Maybe even fund and promote a standardised Linux Desktop
| distribution to replace Windows
|
| I'm old enough to have gone all-in on Microsoft alternatives
| around the turn of the century. European countries have been
| pushing initiatives like this for decades without meaningful
| results. Maybe this time it would work?
|
| > It also leaves the market wide open for their competitors
| to claim without resistance from Microsoft.
|
| This could be good overall for the long term of the software
| ecosystem, although the sudden transition would be
| detrimental for UK citizens in the near-to-medium term.
| worrycue wrote:
| > but not products from the gaming division, that also
| might cause consumer unrest
|
| Some people will complain. Others will just buy a
| PlayStation. Sony can even "sweeten the deal" by giving
| discounts on the console and maybe talk publishers into
| allow people to swap their Xbox copy of a game for the PS
| version for maybe a small fee, and come off looking like a
| hero.
|
| Basically if the Xbox gets banned in the UK. It's pretty
| much free real estate for Sony and Nintendo to move in.
|
| > I'm old enough to have gone all-in on Microsoft
| alternatives around the turn of the century. European
| countries have been pushing initiatives like this for
| decades without meaningful results. Maybe this time it
| would work?
|
| Frankly, no one has really made a focus effort to replace
| Windows. It's more trouble than it's worth. But if MS
| declares war on the UK and Windows is out of the picture
| ... and once the ball gets rolling and should a
| standardized Linux Desktop get critical mass, there is a
| chance it can become an viable competitor to Windows
| worldwide.
| [deleted]
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