Microsoft’s purchase of Activision Blizzard may go ahead in the United States, as Judge Corley sees no danger of harming competition.
Microsoft’s purchase of Activision Blizzard may go ahead in the United States, as Judge Corley sees no danger of harming competition.
How can a judge be so naive?
Money
My head’s soundtrack every time I read money
It’s not naive, it’s the truth. They’re going to bring their games, including COD, to the switch, to steam, to mobile, and will keep releasing COD and other GaaS games on PS.
COD is already on Steam and mobile. The only new one there is Switch, which Kotick all but committed to making happen if Activision remained independent.
COD isn’t the only game that ABK make. I have no doubt Diablo etc will come to steam as well if the purchase goes through. Mobile is also new as well, not just switch, as well as nvidia streaming and the multitude of other streaming services.
COD was the example you chose to highlight… It’s also pretty damn close to it, here.
Activision: basically a COD factory only. COD has its own mobile version. Blizzard: Diablo, Overwatch, WoW. OW1+2 are on everything except mobile already. WoW doesn’t make sense to move beyond where it is. Diablo is on everything except Switch, and has its own mobile versions. Presumably the lack of a Switch release is a hardware issue, as D3 was on Switch.
King: mobile exclusively.
Other than COD on Switch, which again Kotick all but committed to, what new platforms can they bring their games to? I’m not seeing it.
Maybe I needed to be more specific - by mobile I mean xCloud. They’ll be bringing the full console versions of those games to mobile devices via xCloud. I don’t care about COD mobile or Diablo mobile, but I’ll damn sure play MW2 or Diablo 4 via xCloud when I can’t play on my console.
little green pieces of paper make you naive
Fingers crossed the CMA aren’t swayed on it
Why? You want continued dominance by Sony? How does that benefit the consumer?
Taking over Activision and making CoD an exclusive down the line (I know the deal specifies not for a while, but it’s clear as soon as that period is up they’ll be making it an exclusive) is a negative move to combat that - it tries to combat dominance by introducing dominance
Microsoft should invest in their own exclusives to improve their own offering without affecting Sony, which would leave both in good positions, rather than taking offerings away from Sony which leaves both in mediocre positions.
It’s a 10 year deal. Sony can use that decade to invest in its own shooters like they used to with Killzone.
Sony refused to allow cross play for years, effectively making you buy a PS to play with your friends. They took cross platform MMOs like Destiny and made entire parts of it exclusive, stealing what should have been available to everyone who already paid.
Meanwhile Microsoft makes their stuff available on Steam, has nearly-full backcompat going back two decades, and gives me a path to play my games on phone.
Regulate Sony to not be so anti-competitive then, rather than turning Microsoft into them
Making COD exclusive isn’t happening. It would be a terrible business decision, just like making minecraft exclusive would be. COD is the highest selling game every single year. It’s a game that is filled with micro transactions, so the more people playing it the better.
But people will buy an XBox rather than a PS6/7 if they can’t play CoD on the latter… It’s not like people are already tied into a console 1-2 generations in the future, so this would influence what console people buy next.
With Minecraft most players play on PC and frankly taking it off Mac and Linux would make a lot of business sense for Microsoft, however as it’s Java and how easily modifiable and portable Java programs are, they know people would just get it working anyway. The same does not apply for CoD, where nearly everyone plays on console, and a significant part of what console someone buys is what games they can play on it.