All you are doing is trying to change what is happening to make it into a negative. what is the difference between buying Activision/ Blizzard a process that started in January and will not end until at least half way through 2023. and buying 10 game studios over the course of two years What makes one or the other better ? Sony sold double the amount of consoles as MS did last generation. Since the start of this generation Sony has bought about a dozen developers including bungie. How else would you expect MS to compete ? Grow their own studios and only grow their own studios ? There is no way a company can catch up to the market leader that is starting their own studios , making exclusive deals and buying up developers by simply growing internal studios.
You state stuff like Oh COD was historically third party. What does that matter ? Why yet another arbitrary mincing of words ? It was third party because they never launched their own platform. Now they will be owned by a console maker and have their content on that platform. It's no different than something like Insomiac that has made games for all platforms and is now only making them for Sony.
COD is brought up in documents because Sony doesn't want to loose the revenue stream and exclusive perks they get due to their marketing deal with Activision. Why bring up Square just bring up Bungine that Sony already bought. If you want to bring up Square then you can look at the Square titles that sony paid to be exclusive to the playstation platform.
I think you are missing the arguement. MS is saying Look the market leader is growing their own studios , buying up third party content and buying up third party developers. So if the market leader can do this then why can't we ? MS has also stated they hey unlike Sony we are willing to keep ssome of the games on their platform because it makes financal sense. Not just that but it also makes sense that if it isn't exclusive to our platform it might as well be on as many platforms as possible. So that is why they reached out to Valve who only just in the last year got COD back I believe and nintendo who has never had it. COD on the switch would give them a platform with another 120m users. Not only that but cod isn't on any streaming platform. So ms can reach even more that way. This is all already more than anything sony has ever offered.
From my stand point if you want a more competitive market you are going to restrict the market leader. It makes zero sense to restrict the third place party . All that will do is make it harder for them to compete until they leave the market.
I think you even see that with MS's response and them saying hey if you want to do an anti trust case in the gaming market lets do it because we don't have any market share to be a monopoly.
For me I think if this does go through and sony never signs the 10 year agreement it will be extremely hilarious if MS says nope to bad and just puts it on everything else known to man . Cod amico addition !
I tend to agree with
@Nesh here. And the issue is it didn't need to be this way. You seem very into this deal to "help underdog MS compete".
But taking away entire publishers from other platforms isn't competing as no one else can replicate such a thing.
You talk about how Sony is "high end console market leader"(which again is such a weird distinction no matter who tries to use it, even Activision blizzard) but they got that way investing into studios continusly and gradually over many decades.
Their failure in the PS3 generation only made them invest even more in building up the devs they worked with and owned into what they are right now. They put in the the work.
Something MS could have been doing and I wanted them to keep doing in the 360 era when they basically dropped Japanese investment into new properties and new IP in general, and started relying on nothing but third parties and 2 or 3 franchises they owned to do all the heavy lifting for years. Among other silly pet ventures like Kinect.
Which leads to the unfortunate end result. MS is in the situation they are in due to their own actions. Nothing anyone else did. Sony just exploited MSs failure to capitalize on their own momentum after 360 leveled the playing field after Sony's previous failure. And the way Sony did that was simply do what they always did better.
The idea that MSs response to that is not to build up their first party studios gradually and take a hard look at what their failure at 343 and coalition really meant, but simply buy up all the publishers in the wider market to cover their losses in a rapid timescale is ridiculous and they should absolutely be called out for that.
Nothing is stopping MS from competing in the games investment space with Sony, except them not wanting to put in the time and the work anymore.
Gamepass as a service is a good first step to competing on their own merits and it in turn forced Sony to come up with a similar subscription service which gives users choice. That is competition.
Buying entire publishers isn't competition, because it doesn't benefit anyone but MS to have this type of monopoly on the gaming industry when they are a platform holder.
You talk about weird hypotheticals like Sony buying up tens of development houses in a year being similar to this, but in the actual reality we live in there is no situation where they could possibly do such a thing, so it's not even a valid comparison to make.
They have only bought around 18 to 20 individual dev studios in almost 30 years (some of which don't exist anymore) whereas MS wants to buy a publisher that by itself owns roughly half the dev teams Sony has bought over all that time which all count toward games being made by a third party that PlayStation and Nintendo get by default due to being independent. Like I said it's not even a real comparison.
