Some hot takes:
- No doubt that the deal is in a hard position right now, among others things because I don’t think that the merger agreement is in favor of these kind of divestments.
- In any case, if they still want to play the behavioural remedy card they have a very small window of opportunity, but it’s not going to be easy.
- They really need a win (the EC) and as soon of possible. The EC agreeing to access remedies could be a good argument to present to the CMA in favor of accepting behavioural remedies. But maybe not even that is going to be enough.
- I just skimmed the PF, but the arguments are quite similar to the ones from Phase 1.
- The CMA still believes in the high performance console market definition and Nintendo is still not part of the video game console market. I mean, they even say that: “Nintendo does not currently offer CoD, and we have seen no evidence to suggest that its consoles would be technically capable of doing so with a similar quality of gameplay as Xbox or PlayStation in the near future”.
- MS got a nice win with the subscription services definition, now Game Pass is just a different way to pay for games, no its own market.
- I always thought that the Windows - Azure combo was the weak spot of this deal and it definitely was a problem for MS here.
- Very interested to know how the SO from the EC and the PF from the CMA compare. Now that negotiations will formally begin, I guess that more info will start to leak about the SO.
More later if I have time.
Anyway, we are still 2-3 months away from the end :D
CMA is still going with the dumb "Nintendo isn't part of the same market as Xbox/PlayStation" angle, Lol.
Using a made up market definition to back your complaints, which also poses questions if Switch is now considered a monopoly on its very specific market and on top of that, by saying that Switch isn't part of the console market, you're just making PlayStation look even more dominant than they already are, Lol. Instead of the market being Nintendo/PlayStation/Xbox, it's now PlayStation/Xbox and PlayStation is crushing Xbox.
You aren't protecting competition, you're protecting the bottom line of the competitor, Lol.
Looks like Game Pass argument was dumped at least.
I just find it crazy that we're having these extreme reactions to one IP, as if the entire industry is reliant upon this one IP and if anyone loses it they'd collapse and their competitors would soar ahead of them, acting like Sony's entire business is reliant on one IP, Lol.
Full report is now out.
Essay Pro