Microsoft Wins FTC Fight To Buy Activision Blizzard (theverge.com) 68
A California judge is allowing Microsoft to close its acquisition of Activision Blizzard after five days of grueling testimony. From a report: Microsoft still faces an ongoing antitrust case by the Federal Trade Commission, but Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley has listened to arguments from both the FTC and Microsoft and decided to deny the regulator's request for a preliminary injunction. In a ruling submitted today, Judge Corley said the following: Microsoft's acquisition of Activision has been described as the largest in tech history. It deserves scrutiny. That scrutiny has paid off: Microsoft has committed in writing, in public, and in court to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation for 10 years on parity with Xbox. It made an agreement with Nintendo to bring Call of Duty to Switch. And it entered several agreements to for the first time bring Activision's content to several cloud gaming services. This Court's responsibility in this case is narrow. It is to decide if, notwithstanding these current circumstances, the merger should be halted -- perhaps even terminated -- pending resolution of the FTC administrative action. For the reasons explained, the Court finds the FTC has not shown a likelihood it will prevail on its claim this particular vertical merger in this specific industry may substantially lessen competition. To the contrary, the record evidence points to more consumer access to Call of Duty and other Activision content. The motion for a preliminary injunction is therefore DENIED.
No M&A for big companies (Score:2, Interesting)
Capitalism is a great system. Seriously, in one variant or another, it has pulled most of the world's population out of poverty.
But: to prevent abuses, capitalism requires government regulation. Microsoft's acquisition of Blizzerd provides *zero* benefit to society. It just makes Microsoft bigger and more powerful.
Huge companies should be prohibited from all M&A activities. Period.
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But: to prevent abuses, capitalism requires government regulation. Microsoft's acquisition of Blizzerd provides *zero* benefit to society. It just makes Microsoft bigger and more powerful.
Perhaps any remaining managers in Irvine that ignored years of harassment and abuse will be let go.
Re:No M&A for big companies (Score:4, Interesting)
You are giving way too much credit to capitalism than it deserves. That said, it is like fire and has been a very useful tool for mankind but also like fire it can burn a lot of people when it gets out of control... it's fuel is not money but human nature which is inherently flawed but can be used to do some good.
I wonder how MS got to the judge. It's interesting how MS most often gets it's way around the world... Need an open standard office format (after years lobbying against that) they just found a way thru corruption at the IEEE.
Re:No M&A for big companies (Score:4, Interesting)
Regarding that "zero benefit to society" bit, a strong disagree from me and anyone that loves IPs that Blizzard / Activision has sat on and done nothing with for years if not decades. Microsoft has promised to actually make products with those IPs again, in several cases enthusiastically and by name.
Now to hope they will deliver and that they make some good stuff. I, for one, need more Zork. Admittedly, it's nothing of Earth shattering importance. But it matters to me.
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Riiiiight. And your serial-cheater ex-partner promises that they'll never stray again and you'll benefit from their new skills in the bedroom acquired through all of their infidelity.
Of course Microsoft is g
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Microsoft's track record with the game studios they have bought is not exemplary. Also, most things they buy wither on the vine until sold or just cancelled and thrown into the IP locker.
But yeah, hope springs eternal, particularly in the youth.
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"Particularly in the youth". Check the uid and then get offa mah lawn. Lol.
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Will be interesting to see what happens with certain companies for whom Blizzard / Activision has been a major fraction of revenue, companies that may be considered competitors of MSFT in certain arenas.
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Microsoft has promised to actually make products with those IPs again, in several cases enthusiastically and by name.
Microsoft says whatever it needs to say to get what it wants. I want you to think critically here and I promise to give you a million dollars if you do think critically here.
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But: to prevent abuses, capitalism requires government regulation. Microsoft's acquisition of Blizzerd provides *zero* benefit to society. It just makes Microsoft bigger and more powerful.
I'm not going to argue whether or not large M&As are good for society or not, but I do want to point out that's not what the FTC argued.
The FTC's entire case was that allowing Microsoft to purchase Activision would be bad because it meant that Call of Duty would become an Xbox exclusive, and that would harm Sony's PlayStation brand.
And that argument is, to be frank, ridiculous. Even if we accept it as true: so what? Sony already leads in the console space. Microsoft might be better able to compete again
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The FTC's entire case was that allowing Microsoft to purchase Activision would be bad because it meant that Call of Duty would become an Xbox exclusive, and that would harm Sony's PlayStation brand.
I haven't read anything about the FTC being concerned with damage to Sony's PlayStation brand. They are concerned about the potential damage to PlayStation owners who may no longer have access to Blizzard/Activision games on their PlayStation consoles. It is a concern for consumers, not Sony itself.
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They are concerned about the potential damage to PlayStation owners who may no longer have access to Blizzard/Activision games on their PlayStation consoles.
Not Blizzard/Activision games. Call of Duty games, specifically. Seriously: the FTC's argument was focused on Call of Duty, ignoring the rest of the Activision/Blizzard catalog.
The FTC's argument was that Microsoft would make Call of Duty an Xbox exclusive, and that would harm PlayStation by making it less attractive to buyers. The judge disagreed, pointing out that there was no evidence that Microsoft had any intention of making Call of Duty an Xbox exclusive, and that in fact, Microsoft would likely lose
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> [Capitalism] pulled most of the world's population out of poverty.
I'm not convinced of that; a lot of improvement is merely better technology. Very few starved or died of exposure in the Soviet Union, for example. Granted, life was generally rough, but survive they did. For one, they didn't have the market crash cycles the West does.
And the Soviet Union was a dictatorship. Democratic Socialism may offer better feedback to correct problems.
The problem is capitalism is that it tends to be winner-take-al
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USA itself lost the manufacturing card to China
More like sold to them by American business that wanted to reduce it's overhead by not paying American wages. It's not like, "Oops, where did our manufacturing go?". Our greedy asset owners sold it all to China to make themselves richer at the workers expense.
We were warned and Congress just pretended not to hear about it. I guess they missed the memo buried in all the cash being thrown at them by the same asset owners.
Guess it's no one's fault, right?
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Part of it is that China subsidized certain industries to gain market share. Prices for consumer goods in China are relatively high because they rig the money system to make prices cheaper overseas at the expense of local consumerism.
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Microsoft's acquisition of Blizzerd provides *zero* benefit to society. It just makes Microsoft bigger
Well the Judge found some benefits to consumers. On the other hand, they seem fairly unsatisfactory -- Brought their product to cloud gaming services? So what? That benefits them to put their game on many cloud services and platforms.
Ensuring the games are available through many platforms isn't exactly the biggest concern here, IMO. However, t's interesting that a promise to keep parity for 10 years
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As a Game Pass customer, I'm looking forward to Activision games being included. Microsoft has been really good about XBox games going to the PC and their PC versions don't run slower than molasses. As someone who's been boycotting Activision/Blizzard games since 2019 due to corporate conduct, I think Microsoft ownership is probably better for just about every stakeholder from employees to owners to customers.
The FTC tried your line of reasoning at the trial. Something like, "with a merger this big, who
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Huge companies should be prohibited from all M&A activities. Period.
And now for the $64,000 question: Define huge.
Big Evil Company buys Big Evil Company (Score:4, Insightful)
This is horrible. *sips tea*.
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Be an owner too, not just a worker. He who controls the spice controls the world. (The person tasked with mining the spice doesn't get much.)
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Yep. Microsoft and Activision are both wretched hives of scum and villainy, but if you didn't buy a load of ATVI in the $60s or low $70s in anticipation of this merger going through at $95, *you're* the one losing out.
FTFY (Score:2)
Huge, evil company buys big, evil company ...
Reasonable. (Score:4, Interesting)
If you want to make the argument that Microsoft is too big, and that they should just be stopped from growing at all, that's a valid argument to have. If you remove the "MS Borg" aspect from this deal, though, it seems like Microsoft conceded on basically everything. 10 years of CoD at parity across platforms? That's pretty sweeping.
I have a selfish interest in this... I think Activision/Blizzard needs a steadying hand, and I hope that Microsoft brings it. I miss the days when Blizzard had that rock solid philosophy - "It's done when it's done. Stop asking." And the products were really good. Nobody had to worry that the "release schedule" was disrupted because of who was diddling who in the break room.
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"10 years of CoD at parity across platforms? That's pretty sweeping."
It's one fucking game. CoD was representative of the problems the merger represented it was not THE problem of the merger. None of the concessions amount to a hill of beans in my opinion.
10 years is nothing (Score:1)
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What happens is MS doesn't follow through with the 10 year agreement?
Nothing.
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What happens is MS doesn't follow through with the 10 year agreement?
The 10 year concession is like OKAY.. I'll Not take your mortal soul for 10 years, but after that: It's all mine.
This one particular product will be available on all platforms, and we'll support the PS5 for now, But you can forget about that for many of the other games, and future games we develop, especially after that 10 years runs out - don't expect any PS6 or PS7 support.
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What happens is MS doesn't follow through with the 10 year agreement?
Nothing.
You don't seem to realise what a contractual obligation is. Also why wouldn't MS follow through? It's not like the xbox market is big. That would be like buying Facebook only to shut it down in every country except one utterly decimating it's user base and value.
Precisely no one here ever thought that CoD would become a platform exclusive. Even the Sony CEO who voiced this concern privately (as evident from the emails discovered during the court case) admitted MS wouldn't do this and they were just using Co
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It all depends on whether Microsoft is serious about selling X-Boxes. A very good argument could be made that MS going exclusive with COD could fundamentally shift the console landscape. There are millions of people that basically play nothing but COD. If MS pulls it from PlayStation, those people will by X-Boxes. They share mostly the same library, anyway. COD is a system seller. I don't get it, but it is. And every copy of COD that MS would be selling on PlayStation has a huge chunk of profit removed from
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Well, Microsoft has 221,000 employees. There will always be SOME level of harassment and discrimination. If 1% of their staff are problematic, that's 2,210 people to deal with. The questions, are they taking it seriously? And it seems that they are, which is already better than what Blizzard did until pretty recently. As for Bill Gates, it's best to use past tense. These issues were 15 or more years ago.
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Gates and Balmer can't be forgiven. I don't care how many years go by. They should be reborn as cockroaches in their next lives!
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I think Activision/Blizzard needs a steadying hand, and I hope that Microsoft brings it. I miss the days when Blizzard had that rock solid philosophy - "It's done when it's done. Stop asking." And the products were really good. Nobody had to worry that the "release schedule" was disrupted because of who was diddling who in the break room.
I miss those days. Blizzard used to have perhaps the best reputation in the industry. If it was a Blizzard game, you could count on it being solid. Blizzard games were known for excellent UX and stability--and fun. Whole games that spent years under development were canceled after they didn't meet those benchmarks. From Warcraft I (1994) through maybe the 2nd World of warcraft Expansion (~2008), Blizzard basically didn't have a single miss.
These days, the misses outnumber the hits.
Sadly, those days are long
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Starcraft II was pretty awesome (2010) and WOW WOTLK was definitely awesome. After that, yeah company went down hill fast. Starcraft II expansions were good also, so that's at least 2015. D3 was just terrible though and I haven't bothered with anything else they've messed with.
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That’s true—Blizzard stayed strong for several years after Activision. SC2 was awesome. It had also been under development before Blizzard was purchased by Activision and had several changes from old Blizzard. They removed LAN mode which had been a big deal. They removed the ability to do “spawn” installs where one person could have the full game and and play multiplayer with friends.
They also had a hit with Overwatch (never played it).
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If you remove the "MS Borg" aspect from this deal, though, it seems like Microsoft conceded on basically everything. 10 years of CoD at parity across platforms? That's pretty sweeping.
That's not a concession. That was a fucking fundamental point of the business plan. The value in Activision was not in drawing people in to sell Xboxes, the value was selling the same shitty game to millions of people over and over again. The only person who complained about this was Sony, and their own CEO as evident by the emails which leaked privately said he doesn't at all think that MS has any intention of taking COD to be a platform exclusive. Publicly he said something very different. MS offered to p
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Well, that's kind of what I meant. Some people don't think that the point is buying a profitable business with potential, and that it's some nefarious plot to starve Sony and boost Xbox sales. I personally don't. I think they legitimately just want to make money with it as is.
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If you remove the "MS Borg" aspect from this deal, though, it seems like Microsoft conceded on basically everything. 10 years of CoD at parity across platforms? That's pretty sweeping.
You absolutely know that they made that promise just to make the deal go through. Who knows, they may even implement that promise in a fair and reasonable manner... but 10 years goes by quick and solidifying that much market share is a huge advantage. So you, Petersko, get what you want for 10 years and all of your descendants have to deal with Microsoft's domination of the industry... but I am glad you get what you want.
Parity with future Playstation (PS6) (Score:2)
or just PS5?
Looking like the end (Score:3)
for my Battlenet account.
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Bye Bye battlenet and hello to MS 2 factor account.
AI training (Score:3, Informative)
Microsoft's capitalization is 2.5 trillion usd. They should not be buying any company. This is what Adam Smith warned us about when he talked about monopolies.
Where's the monopoly? (Score:2)
In game consoles, MS is in 3rd place, and Sony has > 50%. As far as games development, there are thousands of competitors.
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MS is aggressively pursuing online/cloud games: Moving its Windows OS to an online/ad-driven SaaS, reveals what it wants to own.
Microsoft is hoping they can force the majority of online players to ditch Sony/Nintendo for the upcoming online-only xbox-only Call of Duty: Given that a majority of CoD players, don't use any other online game, that is a real threat.
We've seen that thousands of competitors means very little when one or two companies can outspend, out-advertise and force monopoly-like produc
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Only if you don't count Windows as a gaming platform which I think is completely fair to do given that consoles and PCs have mostly the same titles on them. If you include Windows gamers Microsoft controls over 50% of the market share.
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Microsoft's capitalization is 2.5 trillion usd. They should not be buying any company. This is what Adam Smith warned us about when he talked about monopolies.
Capitalisation and monopolies are not the same thing. Microsoft's individual size is actually incredibly small in most of the fields they operate in. They are kings only in Office software and desktop OSes, literally every other market they are in they are not number 1, and in many cases not even big. In the console space they are at the literal bottom behind even Nintendo who don't even compete in the same level. And in the game space they are a virtual nobody.
Lots of big wins for big techs. (Score:2)
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Pay us enough and we will let you do anything you want!
Didn't the UK block this? (Score:2)
I know that both are us companies, but how will they square this with the uk?
https://www.theverge.com/2023/... [theverge.com]
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Competition chiefs pause legal battle with Microsoft over $69bn Activision deal [telegraph.co.uk]
Re: Didn't the UK block this? (Score:2)
California has a bigger economy.
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Then shouldn't GB stop pretending it is Americas' best buddy.
Re: Didn't the UK block this? (Score:2)
We ARE best buds. But don't let that fool you into thinking we're equals.
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MSFT down (Score:2)
Microsoft investors seem to unhappy with this purchase. Every time there's a story about the sale being blocked their stock goes up. Every time the block is removed their stock goes down.
No it's not. (Score:2)
Microsoft investors seem to unhappy with this purchase.
I wouldn't read anything into it. MSFT is down by about the day to day trading variance. Investing based on an acquisition is a long term game and one that requires analysis, not a day to day game. Day traders trying to make a quick buck is what you're seeing.
Microsoft announced their intention to buy in January when they were trading at $238. They are currently trading at $332, just shy of a past year high, and just shy of the highest point they've been since announcing the intention to purchase. This repr
Re: No it's not. (Score:2)
I'm not talking about just this one incident. I hold a fair amount of their stock. I watch it move day to day. And this Activision deal has been generating stories for months. And every time there's news the market reacts.
Re: No it's not. (Score:2)
I don't day trade. I'm a long term term investor in MSFT. It's largely the reason my investment performance crushes all the index funds.
California won't block it, but... (Score:2)
Won't the US federal government block it still? And maybe the UK? And ...
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The last I read, this was simply a judge rejecting a preliminary injunction brought by the FTC. I also understand it to be the case that the FTC still plans to block the acquisition, this was merely an attempt to prevent anything from going through before those actions are taken. To keep things less messy. :shrug: We'll see.
I guess Microsoft's check cleared. (Score:1)
RIP Candy Crash, COD, Diablo and Star Craft (Score:1)