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Kyuu on 26 February 2023
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Jumpin said:
Shadow1980 said:

I'm all for dunking on corporations. I believe we should be preventing mergers between them. There's already too much economic power being concentrated into too few hands (see the video below, which references this merger). I believe that the MS—ABK merger should be blocked as a matter of principle, and I say this as someone who mains on Xbox (though I also own a PS5 & Switch, in case anyone forgot). Just because Xbox's global market share has declined since the days of the 360 is no excuse for approval. Microsoft is an incredibly profitable company, and as an economic entity are far larger than Sony or Nintendo. What they lack in market share they make up for in financial muscle. Any time a profitable company starts pleading poverty about anything for any reason, using it as an excuse to engage in acquisitions of other companies or to have regulations cut or to prevent wages from increasing, a healthy dose of skepticism is warranted. One gaming company buying out other gaming companies, be they large publishers or smaller studios, is just them using their financial power to press their thumbs down on the scale.

But please, let's not turn this into another excuse to engage in platform warring. There's been a couple of comments bordering on it. Remember, game consoles are just electronic toys, nothing more. We don't need to get hostile towards each other over them. Also, the companies that make them aren't your friends. Not one of them needs defending.

This is a great clip that explains some of what’s wrong with corporate centralization and the potential consequences, with examples. Unless I missed it there are some deeper economic implications of giant corporate tech conglomerates just scooping up parts of different industries.

Some people in this thread are actually buying the PR bit of “Microsoft doesn’t even dominate the console market space. So, what’s the problem?” That’s how far down the throat the PR has been shoved. Like they are incapable of understanding that Microsoft is a massive tech conglomerate with a 2 trillion USD valuation. 

And they kind of suck at the video game industry. They even brag about how much they suck at it. It’s not healthy if a company who sucks at the industry, with a lot of outside resources starts swallowing up said industry, especially its important pieces. That’s part of why there are laws against it—and these laws need to be better enforced, and expanded on.

And they're hardly trying, honestly. They're pushing the unwanted Series S and doing their best making sure the more desired X is in very limited quantity, and they're putting all of their stuff on PC and PC GamePass day and date, effectively turning their platform redundant for a large segment of gamers. Phil literally stated before that if the plan was to sell more Series XS consoles, they simply wouldn't go broader. So they aren't as inherently weak as they make themselves out to be atm. Besides, the Zenimax acquisition hasn't come into play yet. It just gets more laughable the more you think about it.

If the ABK deal goes through and they continue to put their high profile games on PC and PS5, little will change and they can play the exact same victim game as they gobble up more publishers/healthy developers.

Edit:

https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/11/18661247/phil-spencer-interview-xbox-project-scarlett-xcloud-e3-2019

https://www.theguardian.com/games/2020/nov/11/xbox-phil-spencer-interview-microsoft-series-x

Last edited by Kyuu - on 26 February 2023