Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard King for $69 Billion on 2023-10-13


Yeah, those appeal grounds are somewhat light and trivial on trying to make something stick. No real substance added, other than "they're wrong, and we're right" appeal.

The Applicant seeks the following relief from the Tribunal:
1. An order pursuant to section 120(5)(a) of the Act quashing the Decision in its entirety;
Not going to happen, IMHO.
2. An order that the Respondent pays the Applicant’s costs of this Application;
:cautious::LOL:
3. Such further or other relief as the Tribunal deems fit.
:coffee:
 

Well this was interesting but very short

Looks like they are mostly going with the CMA is incompetent

But also unlawful

4) Ground 4: The Respondent’s findings that the Applicant would have the ability and incentive to forecloserival cloud gaming services by withholding access to Activision’s gaming content post-Merger wasunlawful. In particular, the Respondent’s analysis was affected by four errors, each of which in isolation,separately, and/or cumulatively, renders the findings on ability and incentive unlawful, irrational and/ordisproportionate. a) The Respondent wrongly relied on evidence that so-called ‘AAA’ games would be important for cloudgaming services to find that Activision games in particular would hold such importance. b) The Respondent failed to take account of relevant evidence regarding immediate losses from hypothetical foreclosure, which showed that the Applicant would not have an incentive to with hold access to Activision games from cloud gaming rivals. c) As set out in Ground 1 and Ground 2, the Respondent wrongly failed to take account of (i) relevant out-of-market constraints and (ii) the Agreements.


Also

d) Acted in breach of the Respondent’s common law duty of fairness and the CMA’s own remedies guidance.


They are looking to have the Decision quashed in its entirety , have the CMA pay for the costs of the application and further relief as the Tribunal sees fit.

So I dunno does that mean they are trying to have the CTA make the choice and it not go back to CMA ?
 
Looks like they are mostly going with the CMA is incompetent
Which is why this appeal path of attack isn't going to work.
So I dunno does that mean they are trying to have the CTA make the choice and it not go back to CMA ?
CAT doesn't have the authority on making that decision. They can only turn it back over into CMA's hand for any type of potential reversal.

The Competition Appeal Tribunal may—

(a)dismiss the application or quash the whole or part of the decision to which it relates; and

(b)where it quashes the whole or part of that decision, refer the matter back to the original decision maker with a direction to reconsider and make a new decision in accordance with the ruling of the Competition Appeal Tribunal.
 
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Honestly, I thought Microsoft and it's lawyers were going to go HAM in their appeal, this reads as a Hail Mary pass while sitting on the sideline with their eyes closed.
 
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Anyone who can get venture capitalists on board. That's like saying what smaller search provider is going to take down Yahoo, Alta Vista, etc.? And they were dominating in a market segment that was much larger and more established than cloud gaming is today. Alternatively, any corporation entering a new market. People from the 80's and 90's raise your hand if you predicted back in 1993 that Apple would make Sony almost completely irrelvant in portable music players by 2003?
In principle, but realistically there's no disruptive solution to cloud. It's servers with a fixed, high cost. It's not even possible to take an existing thing and turn it into a server farm to power cloud gaming. You need dedicated computing power with an infrastructure, that just costs a Lot, and if anything to date is proven a weak earner with a few failed attempts. How do you get Venture Capitalists on board to sink billions and billions into server hardware for market that's shown itself to not be sustainable (yet)?

Unless there's a disruptive startup, such as home PC owners serving out the game experience locally and distributing the costs, or micro server installations grown piecemeal to service a proven demand, there's no more chance of small player coming in displacing the existing cloud companies than someone coming in and displacing Amazon with its insane infrastructure, or displacing MS with a new home-computer OS, or displacing nVidia with a new GPU. Things are too big and consolidated and expensive in the tech markets we're looking at. You can argue theoretically all you like, but if you had to make an investment, I doubt you'd be putting your money on a cloud Startup like OnLive to out-Cloud MS, Google, Amazon, Apple, etc.
 
This is the right strategy for MS IMO. This allows time for them to win against the FTC and then CMA will fold like a house of cards from political pressure within the UK government. I don't have a crystal ball, but that's my prediction.
 
Though true, what's the business model where a cloud gaming competitor rents Cloud resources from MS to undercut and out-grow MS's own Cloud gaming platform? Or Amazon?
 
Though true, what's the business model where a cloud gaming competitor rents Cloud resources from MS to undercut and out-grow MS's own Cloud gaming platform? Or Amazon?
You can’t have every single game online and all the right price points. Too many games and many don’t make it to gamepass. They only hold 100 in rotation and we easily release more than 100 games a year.

International games etc. all sorts of games out there that don’t make it to gamepass.

There are likely to be big players, but that won’t necessarily remove the smaller ones
 
Though true, what's the business model where a cloud gaming competitor rents Cloud resources from MS to undercut and out-grow MS's own Cloud gaming platform? Or Amazon?

It presents a prime opportunity for a large company like IBM with extensive expertise in data center hardware and operations.

It's an even larger opportunity for AMD or NV (which already has it's foot in the door) with the hardware that they manufacture that is used for gaming.

It's a huge opportunity for a company like Apple which doesn't have a console but has hardware that is capable of driving games.

There's LOTs of potential disruptive players that can move in from the expected sources. The most disruptive player for any potentially burgeoning market are the ones that no one expects (like Google was).

IMO, it's the height of hubris to think that the major players now will by necessity be the major players in cloud gaming in 10 years. They might be, but it is, IMO, unlikely that they will be, assuming, of course, that cloud gaming even takes off in the first place.

If I were a betting man and were to bet on cloud gaming being a major market in 10 years, I'd be betting against Sony or Microsoft being the dominant player in that field and that would be especially true of Microsoft now that the EU has opened the doors to cloud gaming competition by, oddly enough, allowing Microsoft to acquire ABK but only on condition that they freely license ABK games to be streamed on any cloud gaming service to any consumer that owns the ABK game to be streamed with no licensing fees or restrictions.

Regards,
SB
 
It presents a prime opportunity for a large company like IBM with extensive expertise in data center hardware and operations.

It's an even larger opportunity for AMD or NV (which already has it's foot in the door) with the hardware that they manufacture that is used for gaming.

It's a huge opportunity for a company like Apple which doesn't have a console but has hardware that is capable of driving games.

There's LOTs of potential disruptive players that can move in from the expected sources. The most disruptive player for any potentially burgeoning market are the ones that no one expects (like Google was).

IMO, it's the height of hubris to think that the major players now will by necessity be the major players in cloud gaming in 10 years. They might be, but it is, IMO, unlikely that they will be, assuming, of course, that cloud gaming even takes off in the first place.

If I were a betting man and were to bet on cloud gaming being a major market in 10 years, I'd be betting against Sony or Microsoft being the dominant player in that field and that would be especially true of Microsoft now that the EU has opened the doors to cloud gaming competition by, oddly enough, allowing Microsoft to acquire ABK but only on condition that they freely license ABK games to be streamed on any cloud gaming service to any consumer that owns the ABK game to be streamed with no licensing fees or restrictions.

Regards,
SB

Sony is in a bit of a chicken and egg situation. They could easily dominate cloud right now if they made all their stuff day one on the cloud. But they rather sell a ps5 to you and then have you buy the game for $70 bucks from them , even better if its digital. Even better if you buy a project q to stream the game you bought full price from them from your ps5. So they don't want to push forward into a tiny market while eating up their own market

Amazon is already in the market doing very well by using as just an add on like their music and movie stuff . Once they integrate Luna and twitch it will become a power house . I think its the same thing with Google , Yes stadia died but I have a feeling a second attempt will come with cloud gaming intergrated into youtube.

I feel even valve will jump in eventually. They already have live streaming in their client and I think they will eventually want to cut off the middle man in regards to nvidia and other small streaming companies and just offer the service directly in their client.

IMO all these little tiny companies will be gone way before the COD deal ends. They are just too small and can't really offer any advantages that outweigh what the larger companies can offer. Even if this deal fell through there isn't a way for destructoid or whatever to compete with MS or Sony on a pure first party deal release and they can't out pay other companies for games. The best they can hope for is some companies that are putting games on luna/xcloud/psn+ whatever will also just put it on their service cause why not get a few coins. It's the same when comparing these small games to a company like Amazon. As bad as they have done in the past , they have still built up their own studios to at least release exclusive content and they have enough cash to start studios that in 7+ years can release content and as I said while playing twitch there can simply be a button that says hey press here to play this on luna. Not only that but with Fireos they have an easy path to offer android games to stream also. Same with google , you got youtube intergration and then they can also build up studios in time for a second atempt.
 
If Sony ever repeats a mistake like they did with PS3 and lose the market
Sony still beat Microsoft when comparing PS3 to Xbox 360 hardware sales. Nintendo won that generation, though. But One thing I learned about recently is there is the regular video game market, and the high performance video game market. Who knew. Anyway, Sony won the high performance video game market that generation.
You can’t have every single game online and all the right price points. Too many games and many don’t make it to gamepass. They only hold 100 in rotation and we easily release more than 100 games a year.
There are over 400 games on Gamepass right now, and there has been for quite some time. Though Microsoft held on to the "Over 100" marketing well after it surpassed 200 games on the service, the recently changed to "hundreds of games".
 
Sony still beat Microsoft when comparing PS3 to Xbox 360 hardware sales. Nintendo won that generation, though. But One thing I learned about recently is there is the regular video game market, and the high performance video game market. Who knew. Anyway, Sony won the high performance video game market that generation.
Close call, the XBOX Brand was just getting started, RROD, BR, plus MS didnt own ABK nor the studios of Zenimax. Another failure like back then and Sony will have to deal with an even better placed competitor, with more money, and worse circumstances for Sony. Sony almost went bankrupt back then. MS failure with One barely scratched MS as a company.
 
Anyone who can get venture capitalists on board. That's like saying what smaller search provider is going to take down Yahoo, Alta Vista, etc.? And they were dominating in a market segment that was much larger and more established than cloud gaming is today.
Yahoo and AltaVista were big in the search engine industry but the search engine industry itself was very small. Google became number 1 by luring some customers away from the established competition but mostly by being better than the competition in a massively exploding industry. Larry Page and Sergey Brin have also commented many times that Google would have been impossible to start had they not been able to use the university's IT infrastructure.

Look at a like-for-like example in the same space. How disruptive has Bing, a competitor launched in 2009 from a company with more money than Google, been?

Alternatively, any corporation entering a new market. People from the 80's and 90's raise your hand if you predicted back in 1993 that Apple would make Sony almost completely irrelvant in portable music players by 2003?
The start-up costs for game streaming are absolutely colossal. There has been no industry with such huge start-up costs for decades. And as many startups will tell you, VCs are a lot stingier with their money these days having been burned on a lot of big projects that also required a ton of single-purpose expensive infrastructure.
 
Sony still beat Microsoft when comparing PS3 to Xbox 360 hardware sales. Nintendo won that generation, though. But One thing I learned about recently is there is the regular video game market, and the high performance video game market. Who knew. Anyway, Sony won the high performance video game market that generation.
That's an interesting take because if you read the financial reports and review investor calls at the time, it's clear that Sony didn't consider PS3 a win. The amount of cross-corporation effort to launch PS3 along with synergised technologies (Cell, Blu-ray) almost bankrupted Sony. The product and business being commercially successful is how Sony categorise a "win". PS3 was not a win. Sony's management don't think like fanboys. Nor do Sony's investors.
 
Incorrect. The moderators have merely been sharing information related to this just like all the other posters.
Noted. Moderators not making any efforts to ensure information shared is factually accurate or unbiased.

I object to "like all other posters" because for some people, that is what we're striving for.
 
Even if this deal fell through there isn't a way for destructoid or whatever to compete with MS or Sony on a pure first party deal release and they can't out pay other companies for games.
It's boosteroid and they are a service like geforce now and not like gamepass/xcloud/psnow. You stream games you have bought elsewhere. They don't need to out bid/pay sony or ms they just need the EU ruling to be pushed to all publishers so if you have a license they don't need to then also get one from the publisher so you can use it on their service.

This part of the EU ruling is actually really good for the consumer if they can push it beyond ms/abk to all other publishers. Services like Geforce now and Boosteroid could have a market for people who want a streaming service with a little extra bang. Like the top tier geforce sub lets you use a 4080 and 4k 120fps streams, where if I use xcloud I get a console performance level experience so I think there is possibly room for both these methods.
 
It's not the CMA's job to protect Sony, the market leader, from competition. That's the net effect of their decision even if their bullshit reason is Cloud. I'm surprised people buy that explanation. MS might have CoD to dominate the Cloud market in 10 years. LOL. If history is any guide then CoD won't even be relevant in 10 years and the Cloud might not amount to anything or there could be some other emergent competitor like there has been in almost every tech market since the dawn of the transistor.

PS: If the CMA had said: CoD is too big a franchise to be exclusive and that's why we're blocking unless MS guarantees CoD to PS then I would have respected the decision a lot more.
 
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