XBOX x ACTIVISION | Lawyer Reacts to Sony's Biggest Loss Yet (VL758) - YouTube
Hoeg is back after his stroke.
Quoting some interesting comments that he made.
"For the most part, Sony lost pretty handily on their requests to stop Microsoft from getting their internal documents"
"You do have to wonder whether Sony is ultimately going to be happy with the end result, even if they get the Microsoft Activision deal blocked because one of the things which is going to happen with these documents which should be held under seal by the FTC is that some of this information is going to leak out and some of what Sony is doing is going to leak out and Sony is being framed right now by these various regulators as participating in a two party market"
"A lot of these regulators have decided that Nintendo is not in the market they're looking at because they're not a high performance console, that makes it a two party market in which Sony is the vast vast market share leader over Microsoft and you've got all these parties and regulators and various places that are going to be looking at what Sony is doing very carefully and so at the end of all of this you're going to have to ask if you're Sony whether it was all worth it"
"If they do in fact block it, if they don't block it, it's the worst of all worlds, they're going to have this information out there, it's going to be in the hands of their leading competitor, we're going to see some bits and pieces, we're probably not going to see numbers, we're probably not going to see everything that many of you might want to see in this space but we're going to see some of it"
"Microsoft has the big win, they're going to get access to Sony's internal documents, Sony's exclusivity arrangements are going to be reviewed as well as the commercial terms of those documents which Microsoft is going to be very interested in"
"I still think this is likely to go through with reasonable concessions"
As for those articles which say that the "FTC" has denied Sony's request, they are a bit wrong, it's technically not the FTC. The Judge is hired by the FTC but he is meant to act impartially so in the future he will likely rule against some aspects of the FTC as well, therefore it wouldn't be "FTC rules against the FTC" Lol. It's not the FTC's ruling but an impartial judge hired for the case.
Worth bearing in mind because a few articles have made this mistake.