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Forums - General Discussion - Activision is pissed off at the FTC and Sony, Activision COD developers are too angry thats scary

Sony just lost COD , And Activision has strong dagger eyes on Sony and FTC, Activision devs wantin69 billion really was something they want so bad.



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This has really spiraled out of control. None of us know all the details that are going on behind the scenes, but Microsoft could possibly bring up Square-Enix and Sony's relationship, Final Fantasy VII Remake, Final Fantasy XVI, Forspoken, I - VI remasters, etc. I sure there might be some fuel for their argument there. If Sony is negotiating with 3rd party developers to keep games of Xbox (this has been one of their tactics since PS1) then would not the FTC also have to examine both sides of the equation?



我是广州人

Fight fire with fire. Nice guy attitude won't get you anywhere.



It benefits gamers that massive conglomerates absorb more and more studios and publishers? You can have any opinion you want, but to see this merger as beneficial to gamers and that it will increase competition is quite the stretch. Let's not forget what happened when Activision and Blizzard merged, it's not like it kickstarted a series of some of the biggest and worst douche moves against gamers and old fans that we ever saw. Blizzard's fall from grace literally ties directly into merging with Activision. In my ideal world, most developers would be independent, or at the very least have complete creative control without publisher meddling and top-down control with maximum profits on behalf of boards being the sole purpose of the industry. I don't want Sony to acquire more studios with the intent of shutting out other gamers on other platforms either.
As for exclusives, I find 3rd party exclusives to be more or less bullshit, keep it to the 2nd and 1st parties to supply platforms with exclusive content.

I'm also wondering how exactly Call of Duty "faces intense competition worldwide"? What other FPS franchise even comes close? CoD is the world's 3rd largest franchise in revenue, behind only Pokemon and Mario, it's also the 3rd best-selling franchise of all time, behind only Pokemon and Tetris. The closest FPS franchise in terms of revenue is Battlefield, way down at 41st place. Again, regardless of ones general opinion on this case, this is just plain BS. CoD has over 300 million more copies sold than the closest FPS competitor.



I'm scared :(

Last edited by SegaHeart - on 28 December 2022

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She is right on all points there. The FTC suit isn't grounded in reality, they are just making up non-existent definitions and facts in a sad attempt to justify their crusade against big tech, while ignoring the precedent established by earlier giant acquisitions they approved, such as Penguin-Random House and Disney-Fox, 2 acquisitions that created 20%+ marketshares in books and movies respectively (Disney-Fox in particular had 25.7% of the domestic movie box office marketshare in 2021, Xbox + Zenimax + ABK combined software marketshare is not over 20%, probably not even over 15%, as the gaming market is far less consolidated than the book or movie markets are, with over 30 game publishers out there and Xbox only owning 3 of the 30+ if this deal is approved). And of course Xbox is 3rd place in hardware as well, it is very difficult to make the case that allowing merger creates an Xbox monopoly.

It would be easier to make the case that allowing Sony to acquire ABK would create a monopoly, as Sony is 2nd place in hardware (1st place in the high performance console segment that the FTC made up), and the software marketshare of Sony Interactive Entertainment as a publisher I'm pretty sure already exceeds the software marketshare of Xbox + Zenimax combined. If it was Sony acquiring ABK, I could see at least some good reasons for the regulators to block the deal (though I still don't think it would create a true monopoly), but trying to make the case that allowing the 3rd place console maker in both hardware and software marketshare to acquire them would create a monopoly? That makes no sense to me, the acquisition of no single publisher currently is big enough to catapult Xbox from 3rd place into 1st place in both hardware and software marketshare. I just don't see the need for the regulators to fight this deal as hard as they seem set on fighting it, especially since they mainly seem to be concerned about CoD exclusivity and Xbox is willing to guarantee it will stay multiplat for 10 years. 

Last edited by shikamaru317 - on 28 December 2022

Ashadelo said:

This has really spiraled out of control. None of us know all the details that are going on behind the scenes, but Microsoft could possibly bring up Square-Enix and Sony's relationship, Final Fantasy VII Remake, Final Fantasy XVI, Forspoken, I - VI remasters, etc. I sure there might be some fuel for their argument there. If Sony is negotiating with 3rd party developers to keep games of Xbox (this has been one of their tactics since PS1) then would not the FTC also have to examine both sides of the equation?

They already did https://www.eurogamer.net/microsoft-states-final-fantasy-16-and-silent-hill-2-remake-will-not-come-to-xbox-consoles

But MS did, probably still does the same. Although they don't really have to anymore since they can afford to put games day one on game pass which is the anti competitive part. It has also been MS' tactic since day one, Halo...

And the strange situation now exists where Sony owns Insomniac and thus the IP of Sunset Overdrive (which Insomniac kept by making a deal with MS instead of Sony) but the game is not coming to PS consoles since MS still holds the publishing rights.

Anyway all these arguments only increase the FUD about making more games exclusive, not less. It doesn't matter who did what, but it does set a precedent for more exclusivity deals and the chance that other/future Acti-Bliz IPs will be exclusive, just like Bethesda IPs.

And yes, if Sony tried to buy Acti-Bliz-King the FTC would have to examine that as well.



Mummelmann said:

It benefits gamers that massive conglomerates absorb more and more studios and publishers? You can have any opinion you want, but to see this merger as beneficial to gamers and that it will increase competition is quite the stretch. Let's not forget what happened when Activision and Blizzard merged, it's not like it kickstarted a series of some of the biggest and worst douche moves against gamers and old fans that we ever saw. Blizzard's fall from grace literally ties directly into merging with Activision. In my ideal world, most developers would be independent, or at the very least have complete creative control without publisher meddling and top-down control with maximum profits on behalf of boards being the sole purpose of the industry. I don't want Sony to acquire more studios with the intent of shutting out other gamers on other platforms either.
As for exclusives, I find 3rd party exclusives to be more or less bullshit, keep it to the 2nd and 1st parties to supply platforms with exclusive content.

I'm also wondering how exactly Call of Duty "faces intense competition worldwide"? What other FPS franchise even comes close? CoD is the world's 3rd largest franchise in revenue, behind only Pokemon and Mario, it's also the 3rd best-selling franchise of all time, behind only Pokemon and Tetris. The closest FPS franchise in terms of revenue is Battlefield, way down at 41st place. Again, regardless of ones general opinion on this case, this is just plain BS. CoD has over 300 million more copies sold than the closest FPS competitor.

This might sound really weird, but in China no one plays CoD, everyone plays 吃鸡 Player Unknown Battlesgrounds. At least in China CoD has no foothold



我是广州人

Ashadelo said:

This has really spiraled out of control. None of us know all the details that are going on behind the scenes, but Microsoft could possibly bring up Square-Enix and Sony's relationship, Final Fantasy VII Remake, Final Fantasy XVI, Forspoken, I - VI remasters, etc. I sure there might be some fuel for their argument there. If Sony is negotiating with 3rd party developers to keep games of Xbox (this has been one of their tactics since PS1) then would not the FTC also have to examine both sides of the equation?

The FTC doesn't study deals, they study acquisitions mostly. The FF remasters also come to Switch, so SE might just not bother to port them to Xbox. The same way FTV also doesn't look in the Ark 2 deal for example. 



Please excuse my (probally) poor grammar

If Microsoft spun off Xbox into it's own company with it's own stock, the ftc wouldn't care about this. Microsoft the company as a whole, is a monopoly, and the ftc and senators like Warren, and Klobuchar are on a quest against all of the big tech companies including Apple, Meta, Alphabet, and Microsoft.