Ryuu96 said:
Just going to repost the two comments from the antitrust fellas in Era, one is a lawyer. KnowinStuff said: To an extent you're right, but to use that leverage, Microsoft and Sony would have to cooperate and collude to harm Activision. It is possible, but not likely. I think Microsoft & Sony are going to have alot of bad blood after this. They have been long time competitors but new lines have been crossed. Furthermore, this kind of agreement is strongly disincentivised. If it worked, it would deny a profitable market line to Microsoft & Sony, and might make console gaming itself moderately less attractive. It also could present antitrust problems. Contracts that aren't mergers don't draw automatic antitrust scrutiny but they can still draw scrutiny. There is a reasonable prospect that this deal will have drawn sufficient regulator attention to exclusivity deals that some of those will draw antitrust scrutiny. The many statements in this thread to the contrary notwithstanding, exclusivity agreements, in certain contexts, absolutely can be violations of antitrust and monopolistic practices laws in major jurisdictions. In the United States, for example, if the dominant player in a market leverages their position as the dominant player to make it harder for others to compete, in a manner that is harmful to consumers, that is an antitrust violation unless they enjoy OPEC style sovereign immunity, or some other sort of exceptional carveout. This doesn't require a merger to be a violation
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So a 2-prong attack by MS. If we do not get this deal, we setup a case to stifle Sony exclusivity agreements and also throw any monkey Rench into their acquisition plans. Either way, MS is trying to come out of this on the plus side. The fact that Sony does do many 3rd party lockout deals while I believe this is something Phil has stayed away from gives them some form of leverage and scrunty into Sony business practices. Painting Sony as the very dominate player in the market helps MS sell this angle.
