Capital wins again. If only the FTC didn’t sit on its ass for the last 40 years, maybe such market consolidation wouldn’t be allowed and normalized.
Also shout-out to this comm. The Beehaw community seems delighted. You can sometimes really tell which instances skew toward leftists vs liberals
The fact that it was challenged at all is a huge step in the right direction. Couple of years ago, the FTC wouldn’t even bat an eye with these mergers. The new chair, Lina Khan seems to be determined to reduce the power of monopolies.
Which is a good thing, if this isn’t obvious.
The problem lies with the complete out of touch judges now.
Oh no, those judged seem touched. Maybe the need another sponsored yaht trip to clear their heads.
If only the FTC didn’t sit on its ass for the last 40 years
That’s more on the money than you think. Microsoft mostly won because the FTC didn’t clamp down on Sony being anticompetitive which “forced” Microsoft to make these acquisitions. This situation is bad, but the alternative with Sony exclusivity deals all over the place was worse.
It went through because the judge thought that the only relevant thing was where CoD would be, and that 10yrs = forever. Neither is true though.
Well this is a good way to filter out how many Sony fanboys are here lol
I mean fuck them both at this point. I’m tired of AAA shitty games, and platform lockins.
The title is a little misleading. This ruling is only regarding the preliminary injunction. There is still an ongoing suit with the FTC and we will need to wait for that to be resolved. However, knowing how these things go, Microsoft will make a ton of promises about creating jobs, keeping their content available to everyone, and agreeing to play fair. They will get approval and immediately turn around and terminate a ton of jobs, start making things exclusive, and backtrack on their promises. Then…nothing will happen. There will be no repercussions. Rinse and repeat.
It’s my understanding that Microsoft can now close the deal and acquire ABK before the FTC trial would even take place (as soon as July 18th, though unlikely given the new UK CMA negotiations). What happens to the suit if the merger is already complete?
Thank the GOP for basically ridding the US of antitrust law, which is now basically no longer a thing.
The guys who claim capitalism works because a free market will create better things through competition. Guess they weren’t so much for the competition stuff and just became puppets for corporations. We also have it completely legal to openly bribe politicians which makes zero fucking sense, except we call it lobbying so it somehow becomes okay.
Only thing worse than free market capitalism is state sponsored. Decades of the fed flooding the big banks with capital to loan, taxes taken from everyone but the largest corps, and regulatory capture (see copy right for this topic), and we get corporations that demand difficult anti trust actions just to slow down.
That’s not a black and white system, it’s not one or the other. Every system will have aspects of both in them.
Thats not true there are systems that are non-market, non-capitalist, and non-statist.
contemporary democrats are not any better, they make hella frequent concessions to anti-competitive business practices under the guise of licensing or stimulus
This is why US democrats are considered center-right compared to the rest of the world.
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At the end of the day, acquisitions are always bad for customers
This is one of the rare occasions where it’s a good thing. Activision has been a shit show for years. I have a lot more trust in Microsoft to run things.
Market share being consolidated among fewer companies in an industry is always bad for the consumers in that industry. If Activision was meant to go down, it should be through the mechanism of competition, not acquisition.
I’m all for this merger. Maybe Microsoft can use it as leverage against Sony to avoid needless exclusivity
This is a bad take. Any and all large corporate mergers are bad.
Microsoft gaming strategy does benefit gamers. Which counteracts the problem of losing a competitor.
Microsoft doesnt care about profits on single products much compared to the grand strategy they follow. For example AoE4 and all the aoe franchise doesnt really give a lot of profit Microsoft would care about, yet they keep investing and updating it bc they like it and like the strategic benefit.
Not caring as strictly about profit means you dont get as many greedy microtransactions and more balanced approaches. The game pass is also a really cheap deal if you play variety
No subscription deal is ever a good financial decision long term and companies know that. Most people keep their subscriptions running and will end up paying more long term.
That’s not even getting into the “ownership” vs renting aspect.
Netflix used to be cheap and look where we are now. Give it a few years and Game pass will suffer the same fate.
They went up from $15 to $17 or so; the small single digit shift does kind of make me think they’ve eyed the big “2-0” as the price point where a lot of people might reconsider.
I’m certainly considering the benefit of it each month, and so far I’ve consciously decided to keep it. If it’s ever poor value like Netflix, it’s going (that said, Netflix has introduced enough shows that I have weighed whether to resubscribe)
They used to under 10, and sharable, now for me and 3 family members its 51 dollars…
Oh, I guess I was referring to Ultimate. I don’t think regular one-system pricing has gone up yet, it’s still $10. I’m just going for Ultimate for other perks.
I expect this to make exclusivity even worse
Why? Microsoft hasnt been pushing for it like Sony has. Sony has been crazy anti competitive.
Future Bethesda games are exclusive. They weren’t going to be, but they are now.
Well yeah, that’s the point. Maybe Sony will stop forcing exclusivity and sign a deal with MS to get Bethesda games back on PS and FF and others on Xbox.
That would be fantastic, but it’s really hard for me to have that much faith in corporations. We’ll see though. I was really looking forward to seeing Bethesda make another RPG for PSVR, but I’m sure the odds of that happening now are less than zero thanks to Microsoft.
Or just get a PC and it literally doesn’t matter lol
It does matter though. Can’t play a lot of old PS exclusives on PC. That is starting to change for some new games though.
