Microsoft Has Officially Acquired Activision Blizzard

[Eric]

I listened to some of it live. Man, the FTC did such a shit job presenting their case and often it was incredible what they were putting out there, you honestly could have mistaken them for Sony lawyers and not regulators trying to defend the consumer. At one point they tried forcing Phil, while under oath, to swear that all Activision games (not just CoD) would release on Playstation. The judge quickly shut him down and at some point even called them out for going out to bat so hard for Sony.

I hate consolidation and want the FTC to get the funding that they need to break up more monopolies. I don't think this one is a monopoly. It was a waste of time and money for the FTC to chase this considering they clearly had zero idea what they were talking about in court and makes me a lot more worried about their ability to go after cases that actually should matter. I would much rather they spend their energy breaking up Meta (though they did try recently) and Alphabet.

[ShiraNoMai]

I hate consolidation and want the FTC to get the funding that they need to break up more monopolies. I don't think this one is a monopoly. It was a waste of time and money for the FTC to chase this considering they clearly had zero idea what they were talking about in court and makes me a lot more worried about their ability to go after cases that actually should matter. I would much rather they spend their energy breaking up Meta (though they did try recently) and Alphabet.

I second all of this. Why is it that our one (1) ticket out of corporate oligarchy is made up of a bunch of incompetent fools? Ugh.

[Dragon Lord]

It is pretty hilarious going around Twitter and seeing all the people who are talking as if Microsoft/XBust is the savior or gaming and they are buying ActiBlizz for the good of gamers every where, when it reality they are doing it because they can't compete, can't actually develop any games worth a buck and need to instead try and snuff out all competition by buying up as many studios and taking away games from the competition as they can. KEKW You know 100% that if they thought that they could survive taking CoD off of PS and didn't have to agree to share it with Nintendo, they would have made it exclusive to Xbox before the ink even dried on the deal.

I mean, it's not surprising that Americans are actually that stupid, but man, the amount of them on their knees ready to suck Microsoft off over this is just... yikes. It's going to be interesting if they keep this same energy if a company like Amazon starts going around buying up game studios since this case just opened the door for an all-out buying war.

[Moonface]

Yeah, I heard the FTC really dropped the ball on trying to make a decent case, mostly doing a "woe is Sony" type of appeal rather than demonstrating the impact the deal may have to consumers, which is what the case was supposed to be concerned about.

As for taking CoD away from Sony, that isn't happening as of a few days ago:

In fairness to Microsoft, they had extended the olive branch on this to Sony ages ago and Sony didn't take it. Now the deal isn't going to be stopped (surprised it wasn't closed already), my guess is Sony approached Microsoft to see if they could still receive that olive branch for CoD. It'll be interesting to see if player numbers change a lot or not if and when CoD games start showing up on Game Pass, and it wouldn't have really been possible to check that reliably if CoD wasn't going to continue coming to PlayStation platforms. At least now there'll be a proper way to measure the weight CoD x Game Pass has to it.

[Moonface]

Looks like this whole thing might finally come to an end next week, if the UK Competition and Markets Authority's decision that has to be made (albeit not announced) by the end of today doesn't change from the preliminary approval they gave to the revised terms given to them by Microsoft: https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/6/23905...timing-cma

I'll be surprised if it doesn't go through unless the CMA finds something new to be concerned about, but I really doubt it.

I wonder if anything will really change overall either once this is done. Looking at a list of games developed/published since 2020 Activision haven't done much except CoD, and any of the other stuff isn't notable enough to turn it into an Xbox exclusive. At best I'd expect just a lot of timed exclusivity stuff or maybe some exclusive DLC like what happens for certain third party games that get given a bag of money by Sony or Microsoft.

[Moonface]

Microsoft Has Officially Acquired Activision Blizzard
And after over a year and a half since this thread was first made, Microsoft has finally closed on their deal to acquire Activision Blizzard: https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2023/10/13/x...-blizzard/