| pikashoe said: I feel like we're misunderstanding eachother a bit here. I'm not saying that square Enix is on the level of EA or anything like that, just that they are way bigger than bungie. But considering sonys market position it may be more difficult for them to buy even a medium sized publisher like square. Now in future if Microsoft were to start matching sony more that could change. Again I don't consider FF anywhere near cod in terms of popularity but compared to most other activision series it's pretty big. We can't compare Microsoft and Sony to closely because the market positions they're in arecompletely different. If Microsoft were in sony's position that deal likely would not have went through. |
The issue is here that publishers get blocked based off how they affect the market. Either in a vertical sense or a horizontal sense.
In a vertical sense, Epic Games would likely get blocked because as the big AAA game engine, MS and other 3rd parties are extremely reliant on them. That would probably be viewed as more anti-competitive than Activision Blizzard despite the fact that they're worth half as much; regardless of who bought them. Valve would probably be in the same category.
In a horizontal sense, Take Two would be extremely difficult to buy, because GTA is absurdly huge. Making GTA exclusive for some reason, would be massively anti-competitive against MS. This is a big reason why the Activision deal is under so much scrutiny; because CoD by itself makes up a huge fraction of the industry.
Square Enix is nowhere near that big to be viewed as anti-competitive, particularly since most of their big things only come to PlayStation anyways.
