The FTC market definition is proving to be really stupid and now we're seeing why, Lol.

They've changed a market from a 3 competitor competition (Microsoft, Sony & Nintendo) where whilst Sony does dominate Xbox in it still, they're 2nd to Nintendo (although not too far behind) to it now being two separate markets, one where it's just Sony & Xbox and Sony absolutely dominates Xbox in it, outselling them by more than double last gen and the 2nd market just being Nintendo who now have a monopoly, Lmao.

They can now exclude Switch entirely from the Japanese market thanks to FTC's definition and say that Sony has a 98% share of that market and are allowed to moneyhat some of the biggest titles from that market, but not just there, Sony basically dominates Xbox in every major market now except from UK/USA but they still even have strong leads there.

Microsoft can twist FTC's definition in their favour.

Wow, this is great on so many levels. Not only did Sony's lobbying against the ABK acquisition have the opposite effect, but now we have a Senator asking the US trade representative to pressure the Japanese Fair Trade Commission to look into Sony's abuse of the system by moneyhatting Japanese exclusives like Final Fantasy in order to keep them off of Xbox. 

Yeah but I don't believe there's enough substance to justify anything else than a performative stunt. Also it falls in parts on the competition to raise those behaviour to authority especialy when they knew of the act in question but did nothing with it. And MS would have direct access to 2 of such contracts so their inaction now and past use of the very same behaviour would be seen as acceptance that this is to be expected in this industry. 

However if Sony did contracts to specifically exclude content from MS products such as specificaly exclude GamePass whithout refering to subscription services more broadly they may have a case.

A similar case happened between AMD and Intel a few years back because as Intel had implemented a partern system rewarding pc/laptop/sever makers, like Dell and HP, cash not to use AMD cpus instead of basing the rewards on volume of intel CPU ordered. They were found to have wronged AMD with anti-competitve pratice and so should compensate AMD in both a USA court case and a EU one but even with such a blatant malpractice Intel successfully appealed the judgement in EU (I don't if AMD appealed the new judgement though).

Been a long fucking time coming for that one.  I still can't help but notice Xbox physical lagging behind.

Seems like it was a bad PR week for Sony. That but about Sony monopolizing the Japanese market and using their own market definition (so called “high end consoles) against them was brutal.

Trying to pretend like Nintendo isn’t a “real” console maker should carry consequences

Here's the statement to Eurogamer from a Microsoft spokesperson in full: "We haven't pulled any games from PlayStation. In fact, we've expanded our footprint of games that we've shipped on Sony's PlayStation since our acquisition of ZeniMax, and the first two games we shipped after closing were PlayStation 5 exclusives. We did the same thing since our closing of Minecraft as we extended the reach of that franchise.

So an MS spokesperson has responded to the Redfall news saying they "haven't pulled any games from PlayStation". Isn't that just a blatant lie? Starfield was clearly in development for PlayStation before the acquisition of Bethesda and I have serious doubts that Redfall was never in development for PlayStation.

They'd have been better to remain silent than say this.

Microsoft hasn't "pulled any games from PlayStation" following Redfall PS5 reports | Eurogamer.net

Well damn!

The CMA published an addendum to the provisional findings.

Inquiry Group has now revised its view, and provisionally concludes that Merger may not be expected to result in a substantial lessening of competition in the market for the supply of console gaming services in the UK.

Time to respond to the addendum of the PF: 31 March 2023.

Summary: the concerns about the console market have been dropped, only the ones about cloud gaming remain.

Yes, the CMA has changed the original PF :p

Source: Idas

Holy shit they've dropped the Console SLC entirely like European Commission did.

Sony better sign that contract ASAP.

Their only remaining concern is a Cloud SLC (like European Commission).

Some common sense at last. You love to see it