yes they might pay less than 15 years ago but they still pay

No... It is just money :)
It's fully legal but that's what it is... Moneyhating :) No matter how you want to sugarcoat it or call it to make sound better!

And of course, everybody is doing it (some more than others but that's def. not exclusive to Sony).

Do you understand why Microsoft are showing those numbers in the first place and what was their end goal at this hearing?
I don't think you do :)

Sure is, where I said othervise? That is where I pointed it is more expensive than nurturing relationship but can expedite the process.

Not always. A lot of exclusives on Playstation didn't need any moneyhat, they were simple fruit of relationship and past success like Yakuza and Persona. It needed MS expending money to receive the content but there was 0 barriers from Sony on they getting the content after MS gone there and paid to have what Sony was getting for free.

Yes I do, put themselves in the worst possible light while putting Sony as a big bully.

Money, is the only reason why those exclusivity deals happen. Nothing else. Maybe sometimes you get something more tangible assets/resources (cloud infrastracuture/compute time out of it, stuff like that) but at the end; on paper it goes down to a simple thing: numbers.

We are talking about public companies here... They care about ONE thing (and should be caring about that only): revenues, profits and how much money the shareholders will make. Not about donuts... 

If the other one comes with more money; those donuts will mean nothing...

No need to argue if you really want to believe otherwise anyway :)

Depends on the negotiation and deals made, if Xbox offers for Final Fantasy XVI lets just say SE 30 million dollars for a 1 year exclusive deal where the game needs to be on gamepass, and Sony offers less but the game will be go full price in retail Sony is offering less money but the better opportunity for SE to make a good return on investment.  If both companies offer the same price with no stipulations Sony is more than likely to get the contract/game with the better relationship. 

Sure money is always important, but that doesn't mean it will be from moneyhat. Plenty and plenty of japanese titles didn't release on Xbox, and sometimes not on Switch and someothers on PS, and there was 0 moneyhat involved it was just that the platform considered that their profit and roi would be better by sticking as exclusive instead of multiplat and you do know there is just a lot of examples.

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.

I guess they are not considering Nintendo as a direct competitor due to its Blue Ocean strategy.