[HN Gopher] Microsoft Can Close Its $75B Buy of Activision Blizz...
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Microsoft Can Close Its $75B Buy of Activision Blizzard, Judge
Rules
Author : htk
Score : 32 points
Date : 2023-07-11 19:44 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wsj.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wsj.com)
| user3939382 wrote:
| Great let's add another merger on top of a merger that was
| already horrible for consumers and creates even less competition.
| plopz wrote:
| Are you talking about the Vivendi and Activision merger?
| solardev wrote:
| What? How does this lessen competition?
|
| The PC gaming market is thriving thanks to Steam and indies.
|
| Playstation is doing well. Switch is doing great.
|
| Microsoft? Aside from providing Windows and DirectX, they're
| basically invisible. Xbox is just a cheap wannabe PC with no
| great games. It's a wonder they've supported it for this long.
| Maybe this acquisition gives them a fighting chance against
| Sony and Nintendo.
|
| It's not like Activision and Blizzard are even particularly
| beloved, just pumping out endless sequels. They're steady but
| relatively soulless cash machines that don't really innovate
| anymore anyway.
|
| Having Microsoft in control might improve their internal
| cultures, maybe make Blizzard games finally available on Steam,
| get more and Bethesda Xbox games on GeForce Now, etc. Maybe
| even make more games cross platform and with good controller
| support. Those all seem great. Meanwhile the real innovation
| will continue to come from indies while the behemoths just keep
| pumping out new graphics (which are often just Unreal anyway,
| which is again not Microsoft).
|
| Microsoft is just too minor to be dominant in modern gaming,
| and Activision is a has-been that just keeps making filler
| titles. It's not some great loss to the industry. Now if
| someone acquired Valve, that would be a tragedy...
| worrycue wrote:
| > Playstation is doing well. Switch is doing great.
|
| For now. Fortunes change pretty quick in the console world.
| One generation you are on top, the next you are struggling
| for second place.
|
| MS buying Activision is bad. This gives MS a long term
| advantage. It signals to companies like Sony and Nintendo
| that they shouldn't bother competing since they can never
| counter the buying out of huge publishers as they aren't
| worth 2.47 trillion USD like Microsoft.
| solardev wrote:
| That just isn't true though. Sony and Nintendo have no
| problem competing _at all_ by the quality of their first-
| party and exclusive games. For every Call of Duty there is
| a Horizons or a God of War or Zelda or whatever. Xbox is
| the worst of all the platforms in terms of that. Even PC
| and mobile have more (good) games that aren 't available on
| Xbox.
|
| Has Microsoft has any major successes since Halo and Fable,
| years and years ago? They're desperate for games.
| Activision isn't going to suddenly make the dominant
| overnight. If anything, it would barely help stop the
| bleeding. Microsoft is so far behind right now it's not
| funny. I'd be way more afraid of competition dying because
| Microsoft gave up on it rather than buying Activision.
| worrycue wrote:
| MS is playing the long game. They don't care about this
| generation. They want to win all future generations.
|
| 3rd party support plays a big part in a console's
| success. MS is effectively buying out one of the largest
| 3rd party studios denying its competitors their support.
| developerDan wrote:
| The huge concern here is not that Microsoft can't
| compete, because they can as they have far more studios
| than Sony does. The issue is their strategy overall which
| is top earning multi-platform companies, like Bethesda
| and ActiBlizz, to cut off revenue from competitors.
| Meanwhile Sony's biggest acquisitions were studios that
| mainly focused on their platform to begin with.
| solardev wrote:
| I see. That's fair. They offered a 10-year license for
| Call of Duty, at least, not sure about the other
| franchises.
| worrycue wrote:
| The 10 year guarantee means nothing as I can see
| Microsoft crippling non-Xbox versions of CoD - e.g. it
| has poorer performance on PS5.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| The 10 year guarantee includes similar performance
| promises. I don't know how enforceable they are.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| Does Activision have any major titles on the Switch right
| now? Nintendo seems happy to be doing their own thing. It's
| not like they need to buy huge publishers, since they own
| all the important IP (Mario, Zelda, 1/3 or 1/2 of Pokemon,
| etc)
| bob1029 wrote:
| > Now if someone acquired Valve, that would be a tragedy...
|
| Honestly I would cherish the moment. It would be the most
| likely path to actually seeing HL3 released. The one time the
| filthy capitalists manage to do a good thing...
|
| Valve to me has become a pathetic, rent-seeking platform
| owner. No clue why the gaming community still holds them in
| such regard. Linux support and not being publicly traded must
| be a massive deal for some gamers I suppose. The indie
| developers who launch on their platform are much more
| deserving of your attention & praise. The guys who developed
| battle bit have done more to improve my gaming experience
| than anything all of Valve has done since Portal 2 was
| released over a decade ago.
| goosedragons wrote:
| The Steam Deck is pretty great. Probably the biggest leap
| in PC gaming for me in the past 15 years.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > It would be the most likely path to actually seeing HL3
| released.
|
| The thought of seeing HL3 actually released makes me a
| little nervous. When I look at great game franchises that
| had a large time gap before another sequel is released, it
| seems pretty rare for that sequel not to be terrible.
| solardev wrote:
| I don't think it's fair to understate the impact Steam has
| had on indie game dev. We went from "maybe hearing about
| this shareware on the PC Gamer floppy if you're lucky" to
| spamware sites like Tucows to a huge centralized
| marketplace of phenomenal games because the devs had a way
| to let people discover their one-hit wonder, get great
| reviews, etc.
|
| Yes, I want HL3 as much as anyone, but Alyx was pretty cool
| (still one of the better VR demos), the Steam Deck is
| innovative in its own way (and Aperture Desk Job is a fun
| HL universe spinoff), GeForce Now integration is really
| useful for some of us, Cloud Save is awesome, etc. Not to
| mention the sales... because of Steam sales and resellers
| (isthereanydeal.com) games are far more affordable than
| they ever were before, especially compared to the consoles.
|
| The platform is WORTH paying rent for. If you want to see
| how bad it could be otherwise, it's not a hypothetical...
| Epic, Windows Games Marketplace (or whatever it's called
| these days), GOG, etc. are all far inferior in terms of
| ease of use, features, selection, pricing, etc. As someone
| who's been PC gaming since Lode Runner and Commander Keen,
| Steam is by far the best thing that's happened to it in
| three decades. It was even more transformative than 3DFX or
| DirectX in terms of the quality and quantity of games made
| available to gamers.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I hear what you're saying, and don't disagree. But Steam
| has become something I dislike enough that I stopped
| using it years ago. For me, it's GOG, unless I can get
| the game directly from the publisher.
| WhyQ wrote:
| They better not FU COD!!
| TillE wrote:
| Just the UK CMA standing in the way then, with its flimsy
| decision resting almost entirely on speculation about the "cloud
| gaming" market.
|
| Microsoft _should_ be offering to to swear off cloud gaming
| entirely, they should be delighted. Game streaming is a lousy
| solution that requires enormous investment in specific
| infrastructure, it would be smart to ignore it and focus on their
| great subscription service that only requires a $500 Xbox.
| bob1029 wrote:
| > Game streaming is a lousy solution
|
| I feel like it's only bad because it's still mostly a half-way
| house. Slapping existing AAA titles onto networked GPUs and
| calling it a day <> streaming gaming in my view.
|
| Streaming gaming is actually a thing for me when someone builds
| a game using it that would _absolutely not_ be possible using
| traditional technology. For example, an MMO so massive that the
| average player 's network stack couldn't handle all of the
| events, so the only rational option is to render everything on
| some supercomputer and ship the final frames.
|
| Consider also that you can get a lot of reuse out of a
| particular scene graph if multiple players are in the same one.
| Many such cases in streaming gaming. There are new, multi-
| server engine architectures that _will not be possible_ until
| we start saying things like "this will be a streaming-only
| exclusive". That is probably the scariest proposal an MBA in
| any AAA studio could hear in 2023, so I don't expect you will
| see Blizzard or Sony playing in this flavor of traffic any time
| soon.
| nightowl_games wrote:
| You can fit a ton of data down a consumer's pipe. Can you
| actually design a game that would have those network
| requirements? A single frame of video is a ton of data
| compared to traditional game state constructs.
| postalrat wrote:
| What's more exciting to me the client doesn't need that
| data or assets you can actually make games thatb need to be
| discovered though the game. No peeking local files or state
| for what's possible in the game.
| donmcronald wrote:
| And the thing is, latency can be "good enough" for some
| games. I tried out the top end tier of GeForce NOW for a
| month just to see what it was like since I've always been
| skeptical of game streaming. I picked Last Epoch as a game
| since it has (had?) a reputation for being hard to run at 4k.
|
| Even at 4k, I could play it and my views on game streaming
| have changed a bit. This was last year and I was using an i7
| 4770k based system. I can say pretty confidently that I found
| the local lag spikes from not having a high end gaming PC to
| be far more frustrating than the consistent 40ms of latency
| via streaming. Maybe it's because I'm getting older and don't
| have the same reflexes anymore, but I couldn't even really
| notice the latency via streaming.
|
| I also think people are seriously overlooking the trend
| towards secure computing. What if you put a TPM in a video
| card? Then your video for the game stream can be encrypted
| and only gets decoded just before being sent to your HDCP
| compliant monitor. I think it's much harder to build cheats
| if the client side doesn't have any data to work with beyond
| video that gets decrypted as it's sent to your monitor.
|
| Heck, even just a lack of local game data gets rid of most
| cheating, right?
| [deleted]
| solardev wrote:
| Oh man, I hope they don't get rid of cloud gaming. It's been
| amazing, especially with their new partnership with GeForce Now
| (which IMO is the smarter move... rather than sunsetting xCloud
| entirely, just partner with Nvidia to make GFN the default
| since most cross platform Xbox/Windows games support
| controllers anyway).
|
| Streaming games is an amazing convenience (and value) for those
| of us who don't want to be limited to an Xbox (poor graphics,
| limited mouse/keyboard support) but also don't want to shell
| out $3k for a RTX 4080 rig and all its associated noise and
| heat.
|
| Where Stadia failed, GeForce Now, Luna, Shadow, and Xbox and PS
| streaming are still alive and well. And very useful!
| kemotep wrote:
| Microsoft still needs more studios to make Game Pass a "Netflix
| for Gaming" service. WoW and CoD and the rest of the ActiBlizz
| back catalogue help but Microsoft still doesn't have enough
| studios to be pumping out a new major release every month.
| from wrote:
| The FTC's incredibly low win rate in federal court should be a
| source of agency-wide embarrassment. The only place they reliably
| win is their kangaroo "administrative courts" in which they act
| as the judge, jury and executioner but those are probably on
| their way out. But it doesn't even matter anyways because the new
| strategy is going to be outsourcing enforcement to Europe.
| Accujack wrote:
| The FTC is still spooling anti trust enforcement back up from a
| nonexistent state. A lot of the rules governing mergers and
| acquisitions haven't been enforced since the 1980s due to
| regulatory capture.
|
| Read up on developments in anti-trust in the last couple of
| years here:
|
| https://www.thebignewsletter.com/
| anyoneamous wrote:
| Is the low win rate a surprise though? As a foreign observer,
| the US justice system seems to largely be based on who can
| spend the most - so large company > government > small company
| > citizen is pretty much the assumed outcome. I have a vague
| sense the order also wraps around (individual > large company)
| because of cases like the McDonald's boiling coffee, but in
| those cases headlines and bad PR are just acting as a proxy for
| money.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| I would expect the FTC to have a low win rate. Let's leave
| aside how atrophied enforcement of antitrust has been over the
| last 40 years, and the subsequent implications for case law,
| regulations and human skill of litigators.
|
| This is a 75 billion dollar event between two giant companies.
| They can pay for legal advice. That legal advice is well
| incentivized to predict how the case will go, and signed off on
| it. I assume MS has to pay a hefty fee if the acquisition is
| blocked for antitrust reasons, in addition to the time and
| embarrassment for all involved.
|
| Therefore, the only cases the FTC should expect to see are ones
| where highly paid lawyers said "we will probably win this
| case". They might be wrong (and the FTC does seem unable to
| stop too many cases), but no matter how tough the enforcement
| gets, I would expect the FTC to usually lose at trial. The
| standards will just be applied pre-merger announcement (or
| probably pre-offer).
|
| It might be an exciting couple of years when the FTC regrows
| its backbone and the lawyers assessing mergers have not caught
| up yet.
| notquitehuman wrote:
| Can you share a link to that strategy memo?
| morgango wrote:
| https://archive.is/8Ln5E
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