This garbage fire of a thread is still burning, Jesus.

Yeah and ?

I mean tell us something we did not know.  The way you structured this post it make it seems like you were bringing something new but we already know that MS probably lobbied for this.  I am sure they would have lobbied for it no matter if there were donations made or not.  Is the assumption that donations is the reason the lobby was successful. Money make things happen in America, news at 11.

Who cares about the parent company? the games/studios aren't relevant. Their rankings among Playstation software sales will decide their true worth, simple as that.

Kind of convenient to disregard the publisher parent with moneyhat deals but focus on it with acquisitions. The parent company support and fund every of them projects so of course it is a major factor in moneyhat deal. Also by the same token of your own argument we should only judge Valheim and Ark 2 worth by their success among Xbox sales, why jumping gun and call those worse than Sony's ones. 

Anyway I have 0 issue with all money hat deals, but to call Arkane and Tango Gameworks some lesser studios just to paint MS as 'worse' is ludicrous and to do that you focus solely on 1 aspect and disregard any contextualization.

They were and still are arguing this all the time.

Then you should have no issue arguing with them and pointing those flaws directly to them and not with us about them.

This thread tells a story about the congressmen trying to kill exclusivity deals in Japan like they're the cause of Sony's dominance there (omega LOL) while giving Microsoft a free pass to make industry shaking moves.

Your jumping gun here, those congressmen are only asking their Japanese counterpart to investigate the appearance of a dominance supported by unlawful practice. And Japan will most likely resolve the issue by providing context and precision and disregarding the very flawed definition of High end gaming market. Saying they are giving free pass to MS is a false equivalency and kind of bullshits, first this story have nothing to do with the ABK acquisition if not for the use of 'high end market', nor did these congressmen pronounced themselves on the acquisition and the sole US body that should pronounce themselves on the ABK acquisition have already done so with a very strong stance against it. So where is your 'free pass' exactly.

More over, it's posted by Shikamaru who often blamed MS's acquisitions on Sony's moneyhatting.

The OP is pretty neutral in tone and is only about the news itself, why should it matters who posted it? 

It's a standard opinion among Microsoft's fans, not just fanboys/haters. So it's very much relevant.

Then feel free to debate them directly when they make such claim.

Sony is factually paying for it! Xbox's weak position in the market is what's seemingly enabling these acquisitions to come to pass. The weak position is primarily the result of Micosoft's own choices and mismanagement, and yet Sony and their playerbase are paying for it because Mojang/Zenimax/ABK and god knows who else may all skip Playstation in the future.

Sony cannot be factualy paying if it's only seemingly what's enabling MS. But your wrong about what's enabling those transaction to pass, it's that they do not affect competitiveness negatively in significant way and are actually more prone to affect such positively. Also your last sentence is only fear mongering all mojang works remain Multiplat to this day and we have 0 indication it will change, all appearance point to the same regarding CoD. Only Zenimax stand to become mostly exclusive to Xbox but that's how the market behave and did behave for as long as it as existed.

1. Hundreds of billions wasted on games you're getting anyways.

MS will still holds the same value (as they value it) in the forms of ABK assets so nothing 'wasted'

They could have been spent on talents/developers that actually need it to create dozens of new experiences.

This avenue is already well budgeted by MS and no indication they could significantly improve the organic growth rate with massive investment without causing other issue like studios grown fat instead of strong. Also the way you suggest only impact things in a 10 years+ horizon and do nothing for the very short term 1-5 years. There's is no indication making acquisition prevent organic growth and also no indication MS slowed down it's organic growth to favorize acquisition, and all intel we have suggest in fact a very rapid expansion in all their studios from 2018 to early 2022.

A very few people stand to gain from an acquisition war between platform holders.

Not true at all the market health is only reflected by it's competitiveness and consumer all over is to gain from increase in competitiveness 

2. Reliance on massive established franchises could reduce Microsoft's incentive to innovate, and might damage their old flagship titles which may not be a priority anymore.

This is only fear mongering, there's no real cause to effects link and their current pipeline are already full of very promising new Ips even when overlooking Zenimax and ABK studios. GamePass with day 1 title is a pretty major innovation that benefits consumers directly.

3. A huge increase in major exclusives mean a lot of people have to spend more to just gain access to titles they had accessed for years. We'll be spending more for little to no real gains. Only Game Pass subscribers stand to gain something from this. But Game Pass subscribers are a minority of gamers, and Microsoft could have easily paid to get any game they wanted on Game Pass day 1. With that said, acquisitions do make more business sense than the alternative with the long term benefit in mind.

And like I said prior it's how the market operate and have operated since it existed.

All exclusives "matter", but not nearly as much as it's often suggested. 3rd party exclusives weren't major system sellers on PS4. 1st party exclusives are far bigger, and major multiplats are even bigger than those.

To the vast majority of gamers there's absolutely no difference between third party timed exclusive and first party exclusive. They just see a game they want to play and see it is limited to one platform. As I understand things, third party exclusive played a major role in the positions Sony achieved since the PS1 and continue to have great impact to this day. It serve no purpose to take anyone title out and say "see this has barely any impact" while the point of doing Moneyhat deals is to do so multiple time so as each title help with the overall momentum.

Sony's 1st party software sell many times more than their biggest paid exclusives. Microsoft's acquisition craze threatens to take away the multiplats that sell even better on Playstation than Sony's own games. Sony only paid for a bunch of exclusives the best of which would barely crack 1 or 2 million lifetime on Xbox. CoD alone sells well over 10 million annually on Playstation.

And I don't expect CoD to ever leave PlayStation ecosystems either, even prior to Sony's challenge and MS legal concession it was only logical MS would use the same approach as Minecraft. But even then relying on third parties is a risk, a calculated one maybe but still a risk, you win some and loose some and that's just the way it goes.

So if someone wasn't happy about Sony's approach out of principle (as opposed to tribalism), then they shouldn't be happy with MS doing it worse.

Depending on the context, yes but you have to pay attention not to jump to conclusion about anyone intent and really use the context they provide. Being for acquisition and against moneyhat or vice versa, as an example does not make one automatically bias you have to first ask on what metrics they use to justify the difference of opinion.

If you think FF7R, Persona 5, and Forespoken being on Xbox on day 1 would have changed the marketshare by more than 0.1%, then you would be wrong. Aside from maybe Final Fantasy, their marketshare impact just isn't all that different from Cuphead or Tunic skipping Playstation for a period of time. And many of those exclusives have overlapping fanbases.

Same response as prior: It serve no purpose to take anyone title out and say "see this has barely any impact" while the point of doing Moneyhat deals is to do so multiple time so as each title help with the overall momentum.

Platform holder acquisitions are generally not different. Hence why they should be opposed by gamers who consider themselves impartial. Bungie and Mojang continue to support Xbox and Playstation, but don't expect this to remain that way forever.

Your definition of impartial here is a partial take for conservatism. 

Smaller acquisitions are fine. No one complained about any acquisition MS made that wasn't Bethesda/ABK (Mojang warrants criticism but they kept Minecraft on PS so it's good "so far").

I saw plenty of complains for the 2018 and 2019 acquisitions from MS here.

Smaller acquisitions will not harm several millions of gamers (especially not 2nd party acquisitions) and often help to increase the size, productivity, and quality of the studio. Countless small/mid sized developers would benefit from big publishers acquiring them, so I support this when it's done right (Done right = growth in popularity, quality, staff, etc).

There's no indication that could not be the case even for larger acquisition. Especially when the acquirer have resource to further and better fund all underlying studios. 

I find it sad that the situation has gotten bad to the point of making it acceptable to fully support such a response from Sony.

Not sad, realist. Like said many time prior acquisition is part of this industry and it as been so from the very start of this industry, if one expect this to change when it's convenient that's the sad part.

which as you said could only escalate to even worse developments. MS could use that against them to justify another major acquisition.

Escalate? Worse? I think you may have misinterpreted some of what I was saying if this is what you get. A response from other entity isn't necessarily an escalation of things nor is it is worse or better. Acquisition like these may change change status quo for some and they may have to react in a way or another, but that's just how competition work and whenever competitiveness increase consumer end up benefitting, provide those consumer are not motivated by blind faith or blind hate.

Sony needs better lawyers lol.

Sony need better arguments and a better case when trying to block other from doing the same action they themselves did many times over and when they are benefiting from a very advantageous positions especially when looking at the market definition they themselves pushed regulators to adopt.

I honestly think the best realistic scenario is for Amazon and Google to step in, because the odds are they'll keep the games multiplatform.

I'm all for it whatever they would bring.

A platform holder spending well over $80 billion to acquire one major publisher after the other is an unprecedented development. The amounts of money they're spending is representative of the magnitude.

Magnitude of their faith they now have with GamePass, there's nothing different with their action except the size of it. The size of the transaction however have little to do with the end results for the markets competitiveness, all it does is increasing scrutiny by regulators, which it obviously did here.

I criticized Sony's moneyhats long before MS went ham with acquisitions. And let's not spin undisputed facts as "views".

I didn't spin fact as view but the conclusion you made upon those

It's not my "view" that Xbox's 1st/2nd party growth is poor compared to Sony's.
It's not my view that Playstation's 3rd party exclusives represent a tiny portion of Playstation's best sellers, and don't rank high.
It's not my view that the underpowered Series S is selling poorly and Series X is in limited quantities.

All indication point to MS outshining Sony with organic growth since 2018 acquisitions doubling and tripling many studios after acquisition and budling 2 new ones. The fruit of their efforts have yet to materialize fully but the pipelines are promising for sure. The Series S selling poorly is entirely subjective and so isn't a fact and the recent reports suggest that it actually is selling quite respectably. Many of moneyhated titles also sell well and have high reviews, comparing the results to Sony's powerhouse to diminish their impacts don't do justice to the practice strategy and intent.  

Game Pass aside, Microsoft underdelivered and they're trying to remedy their mistakes and weaknesses using bruteforce. I rest my case.

Aside from GamePass is one hell of a huge aside. MS underdelivering is both true and false depending on what you look at (like you said aside from GamePass) and bruteforce is not exactly the right word. Bruteforce entails that there's very little or no strategy with its action only relying on the strength/repetition of these, but the ABK transaction is actually very strategic to GamePass especially in Europeans market where Xbox + Mojang + Zenimax represent only a small fraction off the market while ABK represent much more of an appeal.

Here's a source that tell you it is much more strategic than it may seems at first using French market

https://www.sell.fr/sites/default/files/essentiel-jeu-video/essential_video_game_news_-_february_2020.pdf

The US senator Kevin Cramer who sent a letter to Sony cares to explain why he received a donation by Microsoft ?

They need to defend trillion dolar company and the trash people in positions of power that is receiving money to help the teillion dolar company. One thing i would never dreamed of seeing on this site is walls of text defending lobbying.

Because you can openly buy democracy and political influence in the USA and that's normal over there. In large parts of Europe we would call this corruption. In USA it's simply a part of the game.

Show me where Maria Cantwell has received money from Microsoft to go against Sony, I'll wait but I think I'll be waiting for a long time.

This same image was spread across ResetEra and caused that thread to be temporary locked even there because everyone misread it and went on a weirdo gamer witch-hunt against her based on a lie, excuse me for trying to push the facts, but if you want the thread locked that much then I suppose you can do that if you want.

There's a mistake being made here and it is the automatic assumption that all lobbying = an exchange of money, it doesn't. Lobbying simply means trying to seek to influence (a legislator/person in law) on an issue and doesn't have to mean money, in fact, it often doesn't. If you emailed your local legislator on an issue regularly then guess what, you'd be lobbying too.

And it isn't exclusive to America either, lobbying happens in UK and Europe. Both Microsoft and Sony have lobbied throughout the entire course of this acquisition, it becomes an ethical issue when money exchanges hands in order to make someone do something for you (that is called bribery), zero evidence that has happened for this particular issue though.

Complaining about sending Senators PACs is an entirely separate issue from this issue. If anyone is going to be upset that Microsoft sent money to a politician at some point throughout their entire career because you hate lobbying then that's fine but don't pretend like Sony doesn't do it either. There's no evidence of it happening here though for both sides on this particular issue.

US Senators "Deeply Concerned" About Microsoft's Proposed Deal To Buy Activision Blizzard - GameSpot

Cory Booker is in here and yet Microsoft did a PAC for him once before for $7,500...More than the amount any of these Senators speaking out on behalf of Microsoft have received from Microsoft during their entire careers which is funny. Y'all acting like a one time payment of $2,875 across a 31 year career is enough to get a politician to do anything, I could buy my own politician with that much!

Instead of the more logical explanation, that being that she is a Washington Senator and Microsoft is a Washington company who invests extremely heavily in...Washington. After the ABK acquisition was announced, Chuck Schumer asked Microsoft to invest in New York. Was he paid or is he simply trying to get something positive for his constituency?

Yes, somebody told that on another board. I didn't know.

People in here really don't seem to understand how political donations work:

1. Companies themselves aren't allowed to give political donations (except through PAC's, which are closely regulated), so those Microsoft donations you are seeing are primarily donations from employees at Microsoft, not from Microsoft themselves.

2. Political Action Committees (PAC), the only way that corporations can directly fund a politician's campaign, are closely regulated by the Federal Government as well as most State Governments. They are required to be registered as a PAC with the FEC (Federal Election Commission) and submit detailed financial data afterwards, and the maximum allowed donation per candidate by a PAC is $5,000 per election cycle, a mere drop in the bucket compared to the millions of dollars of total donations that a US senator receives.

3. People here are mentioning that Microsoft's PAC gave Senator Kevin Cramer $5,000 in the last election. Cramer's total donations over the last 5 years were $6.925m, and Microsoft is not listed among his top 5 donors, $5,000 from Microsoft through a PAC is a drop in the bucket compared to his total donation amount and hardly enough to buy any sort of influence over his decisions. It's far more likely that he is actually concerned that Sony's anti-competitive moneyhatting strategies could harm the potential for growth of the video game industry within his state, just like he says.

4. Microsoft overwhelmingly funds Democrat politicians, and yet there are 4 Republicans mentioned in this article asking the Biden admin to pressure Japan about why their regulator is allowing Sony to moneyhat Japanese games off of Xbox when they already have a gargantuan marketshare lead over Xbox there.

5. While Microsoft isn't listed here and I can't find the employee donations by party for Microsoft, based on the donation track record of other big tech company employees, Microsoft's employees most likely also overwhelmingly donate to Democrat politicians (especially since Microsoft is headquartered in Washington, which is I believe the 5th most liberal state in the US as of the 2020 election).

So PACs can only be issued during the an election cycle?

To point 4, like I said as well, Cory Booker received more in PAC money from Microsoft than the two Senators being mentioned (Cantwell and Cramer) and yet Cory is against the acquisition it would seem, Lol. Apparently it only costs ~$5,000 to buy a Senator. Who knew that I have enough money to buy my own Senator, I'm moving to America and buying a Senator!

Yeah, 5 is fairly obvious, Washington Senators receive a lot of donations from people who live in Washington (shocking), and Washington Senators support Washington companies (double shocking).