The Federal Trade Commission’s request for an injunction stopping that acquisition heads toward opening arguments this week, the federal regulator cites one piece of what it calls “powerful evidence” that it can’t trust Microsoft’s assurances. In short, as the FTC puts it, “Microsoft’s actions following its 2021 acquisition of ZeniMax speak louder than Defendants’ words.”
I’m very happy that these agencies are blocking this acquisition. I had no faith they would.
There’s nothing good about the fourth largest video game publisher (third for first parties) acquiring the sixth largest (third for third parties). We need more variety, not more consolidation.
It pains me to see so many people praise the acquisition ofr Microsoft to become “competitive” again.
Bro Microsoft is a trillion+ dollar company. They can spend their own fucking money making studios. If they can’t, that’s their problem. Letting them swallow up long time multi platform studios just to make their long running multi platform games Xbox exclusive is not the answer to that problem.
This argument could be made for any console exclusive. I’m not saying I support the acquisition.
Interesting. I’m against large companies buying up all these developers, but it seems strange that this is where they’re trying to draw the line.
I don’t understand how anybody could see this market consolidation as a positive! Yes, in the short term ABK games will be added to Game Pass, but once Game Pass is the only “game” in town, the price gouging monopolistic behavior will follow.
Maybe it’s just me - I see enough game studios being formed week by week, not even just making crummy pixel games, that I can never picture any publisher being “the only game in town” in any remotely significant way.
Just look at what Spotify has done to the music industry. There was a massive contraction in the music buying market and music streaming services now are fully dominant. And Spotify + Apple have used their oligopoly status to fuck over artists and even record labels, forcing them to accept a fraction of a penny per stream.
It’s not a one to one comparison, but I could see subscription-based game licensing crowding out buy to own games eventually if Microsoft keeps consolidating the market as it has been. And then, once consumers are used to never paying for games individually, Microsoft, Amazon, Sony, etc will be able to dictate whatever terms they want to game developers.
And worse is that the industry could react with further consolidation if this went through.
After Microsoft bought Bethesda, Sony reacted by buying a series of studios for itself. Yeah those studios had a historically close relationship with Sony already (besides Bungie, the most recent), but now they’re officially tied together.
I’m not sure if Sony has the FU Microsoft money to buy another top ten publisher, but imagine if they could and bought out Ubisoft/EA/Square Enix and now those games would never come on Xbox again?
It’s already hard enough for gamers to play anything/everything due to exclusivity and needing to buy multiple systems. If I didn’t have a PC, I would be extremely annoyed at being unable to play Starfield when I played Oblivion, Fallout 3, New Vegas, Skyrim, etc on PlayStation.
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All this really does is seem to encourage the way Sony does business which is to just buy exclusivity agreements with third party studios. Both methods (buying established studios outright and buying exclusivity agreements) seem highly anticompetitive and bad for gamers overall.
Or they could nurture growing studios and develop new IP under their own management?
So could Sony, instead of locking down stuff like Final Fantasy. They had plenty of developers in Japan to work on a JRPG, but they downsized those studios to focus on their big AAA western Devs.
This is about Microsoft’s options to build a better quality library, not a defense of Sony’s timed exclusivity practices (practices which Xbox also used when on top during the 360 era).
Still, Sony did nurture the studios they acquired and developed quality titles through those studios that pushed them ahead and gave them the reputation of having a “prestige” library. Even recently, Returnal is an example of such nurturing.
Nothing prevented Microsoft from competing except their own poor management decisions to milk franchises dry from the 360 era without adequate quality controls and a general incompetence at developing a comparably prestigious library since that generation.
Microsoft being blocked from throwing their much larger bags of money at acquiring one of the biggest publishers in the industry does not mean their only option is to do timed exclusivity deals.
