General / Off-Topic Activision / Microsoft deal

Northpin

Northpin
The CMA said Microsoft could be incentivised to make Call of Duty exclusive to its Xbox consoles, thereby locking out rival Sony’s Playstation, reducing competition and potentially increasing prices for gamers. The availability of exclusive games can prompt players to switch between consoles and is viewed as critical to boosting sales.
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Didn't Sony/PS started the Exclusives trend?
How come UK allowed Sony's exclusives on the market - didnt that reduced competition?
 

Morbad

Morbad
starman said:
I thought I bought call of duty?
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You may have bought a license to play Call of Duty.

starman said:
How can UK dictate what is a US corp matter anyway.
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UK law can exclude corporations from accessing UK markets.

starman said:
Why cant we just develop a new better game..
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Because people buy on name recognition. It's the main thing that gives intellectual property of this type value.

Northpin said:
Didn't Sony/PS started the Exclusives trend?
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Video games from 3rd party developers/publishers that were exclusive to a given platform were common long before PlayStation.

Northpin said:
How come UK allowed Sony's exclusives on the market - didnt that reduced competition?
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All exclusives do; that is the point of them. Laws and rulings against anti-competitive practices all draw largely arbitrary and rarely consistent lines.
 

Northpin

Northpin
I dont see Microsoft being a problem
After all, their products are running even on Macs.

But Sony? they're the monopolists. If anything, regulators should take action against Sony.
They have a very strong foothold in gaming industry, in music industry and in movie industry. So they have the ability to do everything in-house, removing competition (see the recent The Last of us success as a game then as a show, owned by Sony)
 

Lhorndra

Lhorndra
starman said:
How can UK dictate what is a US corp matter anyway.
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Most countries or multinational blocs (like the EU) do this all the time, see Competition regulator. It's as arbitrary as Morbad said.
Northpin said:
Didn't Sony/PS started the Exclusives trend?
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Not really, exclusives are as old as the video game console itself, especially after the Atari VCS entered the market in 1977. Nintendo is infamous for developing exclusively for Nintendo hardware (with some rare exceptions).
 

Morbad

Morbad
Northpin said:
I dont see Microsoft being a problem
After all, their products are running even on Macs.
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How does Microsoft's half of a duopoly (office productivity software), or their near monopoly (PC client OSes) spreading to other platforms make them less of a problem?

When it comes to video games, Microsoft is already an enormous publisher with a history of gobbling up studios whenever it can and the acquisition of another enormous publisher is good for exactly no one other than Microsoft shareholders and whatever regulators/legislators are getting their palm's greased. The Activision Blizzard deal alone is larger than every game studio Sony has ever acquired (Activision Blizzard is almost three times as big as Sony Interactive Entertainment and Microsoft is almost twenty times as large as Sony). Of course Sony has made large acquisitions that probably should have drawn more regulator scrutiny, but this deal dwarfs all of those in almost every relevant metric.

Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard isn't just a regular every-day kind of evil overlordship, it's positively horrifying.
 

Northpin

Northpin
In terms of Consoles (hardware sales and exclusives), Sony is still way above MS.
And Sony is a much more closed system than MS.

If regulators want to prevent the deal, by all means they should, but at least they should find another motive than "Call of Duty will no longer be available on PS" because this sounds like crap.
 
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