That's kinda how the CMA feels.
Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard King for $69 Billion on 2023-10-13
- Thread starter Rangers
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Do we have examples of other CMA blocks that illustrate consistent behaviour and values?
CMA official: digital markets don’t compel rethink on behavioural remedies
Complex digital markets don’t justify a softening of the broad consensus that strongly favours structural remedies in merger control, despite the European Commission accepting high-profile behavioural remedies in the Facebook/Kustomer and Google/Fitbit deals, a senior official at the UK’s...
globalcompetitionreview.com
UK regulator receives more powers to rein in Big Tech
Google, Apple, Amazon and other tech giants could face fines of up to 10 per cent of their global turnover under a new digital consumer bill.
eandt.theiet.org
5 days ago CMA receive more power to fight against big tech.
How do you even define democratic process? These bodies are actually indepentent so that no political interests, specifically the ruling party, are involved in serious economic issues to manipulate the market, either for personal gains or to exploit short term phenomenons to increase their chances for reelection.
Hence why the CMA is indepentent from other government departments and is requesting inputs and information from consumers and other companies on top of their own research and not the input of politicians. You are referring to this as if the CMA has something to gain against the will of the people when there is nothing that points to it. Its not like their was a public voting and did whatever they wanted.
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Despite the fact that CMA's decision had zip to do with Sony or PlayStation, here is a raft of posts all focussing on Call of Duty and PlayStation.
That's posted Jan this year. Is there anything predating this showing the CMA is operating fairly with MS? Or is MS the first in a line of new-thinking regulation?CMA official: digital markets don’t compel rethink on behavioural remedies
Complex digital markets don’t justify a softening of the broad consensus that strongly favours structural remedies in merger control, despite the European Commission accepting high-profile behavioural remedies in the Facebook/Kustomer and Google/Fitbit deals, a senior official at the UK’s...
10% of global turnover? Yeah, right. That's more than the UK market for these companies is worth. You'd need global consensus across nations - USA + EU - for that sort of power. Otherwise the companies are relatively bigger than the nations and it'd be better economy for them to just ditch the troublesome market. That is, do dirty, get presented a fine of $MUCH, ditch the market because that fine is worth more than that single market.UK regulator receives more powers to rein in Big Tech
Google, Apple, Amazon and other tech giants could face fines of up to 10 per cent of their global turnover under a new digital consumer bill.
5 days ago CMA receive more power to fight against big tech.
While I do not agree on the games part and I don’t think that we can blame Microsoft for ruining pc gaming there are some valid points in what you say.
There is some incompetency within Microsoft they can’t even successfully copy a working product. Their mp3 player, windows phone, stream app etc etc.
Putting ABK in their hands may not be a good idea after all. Looking at what they do with current studios what we want them to do and what would they do could be two different things. There is a bigger problem within Microsoft and buying abk will not solve it.
The past is awesome, don't get me wrong, but times change, and people learn quickly how to never repeat those mistakes. Sony went out of their lane here to try to get into the computational industry that's why they fumbled. MS came in with a very simple to develop for console while PS3 was incredibly difficult. That just put a ton of great third party titles onto their platform while PS3 lagged. They had some great exclusives sure, but by the end of that generation even that died out.
I agree that games is what gets people to buy a console. You're not going to get people to buy 2 consoles in this day of age, it's a bit tone deaf when the entire world is complaining about overinflation. Things aren't affordable in that sense. This recent report here:
I mean, once the decision has been made to make a purchase into an ecosystem, I don't think many are going to switch back. The generation is won for Sony, they will pass the 40m goal line soon, and everyone will go with the company who is dominant because they will have the bigger library, with more of their friends online, with likely better exclusive perks. Let's be real, they're not really going to care that they are missing out on these games on Xbox. We could say that this generation is lost in that sense the likelihood of clawing their way out of this by the end of this generation and overtaking Sony is so low, its likely above 1% but next generation is another opportunity for them. I would hope that all of their mergers and games would have come around by then, but with hardware being the blocking point for people signing into your ecosystem, but if they can get the right games onto cloud, maybe they wouldn't have to. Unfortunately, they are being blocked on it.
If I'm going to be honest with myself, in a 50/50 situation in which I don't know what the future truly holds, then would you bias to block or pass. My own feelings here is to pass it through, because MS here is pushing towards innovation sooner, they're building value where currently there wasn't any. This isn't a guarantee that they will be the leaders of this new market, an by giving them this, perhaps they have a better chance to be, but in the end they are taking a 70B dollar risk to build more value for customers where there won't be for a very long time.
If I choose to block, nothing happens really.
And in a competition, we should be rewarding people trying to compete and be aggressive, I understand there are rules to not destroy the spirit of competition and many major mergers have done that: not created value but used their position to increase the prices. But lets be real here, we're talking about the same video games, but with a different ACCESS, not different CONTENT. And innovating to create this new market will make gaming cheaper across the board for a much larger market, allowing more competitors to enter and thus have much more innovation because a great deal of these many markets can be served. There are way more games than people can play or learn about, but today they are only marketed by 3 platforms. A lot of great games are missed. With cloud you could have at least 5-8 more players, all carving out a particular catalog of games and marketing those games so that they gems come to light. We're not going to be forced to use the big 3, as long as they can rent the hardware, library curation and availability is all that matters. The big 3 platforms today can't possibly license every single game under their subscription services today. It's too much $$$.
The console industry has been locked for a long time and it's stayed the course for a very long time. I'm not criticizing that the CMA made a bad choice, but they appear more interested in stopping things for the sake of preserving competition that is not moving perhaps in fear in making a mistake, when there is a clear opportunity here where a new ACCESS for games is being built where tons more competition could come in and serve games to an enormously sized market with the need of hardware - and this merger is the accelerant of that.
This is the type of nuance I want to see from a regulator. It's can't be Lina Khan's block all mergers above 1B no exception. There's just no nuance there. And if you don't believe in Lina Khan's type of regulation, and you do believe hey, yea that no exception rule is sort of bullshit, then everyone else here is talking about that nuance. I think MS fits that case, especially in a situation where we are talking about changing how we ACCESS to games (which is all that cloud gaming is, over console gaming), then why we blocking it other than some fear that 10-20 years from now that they would dominate it.
But how does one dominate ACCESS? You can't, and this merger isn't about MS making mergers to block out ACCESS.
You can only dominate content.
And if they cleared MS to have the ABK content on console, then there's no reason that can't apply to cloud.
lol, I'm not even sure the internet has truly figured out what the first two do.
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Very. You overstate Sony's first parties, but from PS1, Sony didn't have any studios except Psygnosis. It was third party content thanks to cheaper game production costs than carts and Sony getting devs on board. They also marketed amazingly to non-gamers and opened gaming culture to more general pop culture, and choice of tech allowed cheaper games.
Exclusive content helped, but that was because of PS1's technical and licensing offerings, not Sony dealings.
If they were signing exclusivity deals, sure. But they didn't. They offered a better product and gave developers reason to be exclusive to PSOne, while Nintendo gave them reason to avoid developing for N64. The hardware situation was also so polarised that cross-platform was something generally avoided.
In short, it was a completely different market with completely different dynamics and doesn't offer any parallels with MS's situation buying ABK.
It's hard to say because the CMA as an institution is fairly young with less than a decade in age and it just recently started operating within it's own regulatory framework post-EU membership a little over 3 years ago ...
Before the EU Commission's Directorate-General for Competition in cooperation with the CMA would've reviewed the ABK/Microsoft M&A case for the UK so the CMA wasn't truly independent in those instances ...
Of the little we've seen so far in the short window they've operated independently for these cases, they do appear to be self-consistent ...
As per some of the tweets here, it’s really since Brexit occurred that they’ve been handed the reins to make decisions.
Edit: wrong spelling of reins
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Inside their MS/ABK decision are so many places the contradict themselves. That's not self-consistent.
It did have a predecessor. The OFT and CC. The concept is not new in the UK. I'll give you six guesses where the staff of the CMA came from.
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It brings UK CMA in line with the the fines that have been permissible by the EU regulator for about the last twenty years. You may recall in 2013 when the EU fined Microsoft 561m euros ($731m; £484m) which was around 1% of its global turnover but it could have charged 10% which would have been in excess of $7b. BBC News covered this in some detail.
The point of having such power is to make companies think twice. Like many markets, the UK is to lucrative to walk away from but what keeps greedy companies honest isn't honesty, it's the threat of a crippling fine. That doesn't mean a 10% global turnover fine would be handed out for all offences or infractions, the punishment must be proportionate.
This function of government has been around in some form since 1965 when the Mergers and Monopolies Act 1965 was introduced. It's had a lot of organisational names over the years.
Absolutely untrue, this is one of their areas of governance where there is both an EU regulator and national regulators. In the UK it's been the CMA for a while now, in France it's the Autorité de la concurrence, in Germany it's the Bundeskartellamt, in Italy it is the ICA. Whether individual countries need to clear this merger depends on the establishment of the parties concerned in the Member State. The EU can approve a merger, which can still be prevented by any one of the member states whose monopolies regulation applies.
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Is Sony not in the cloud streaming space?
They had Sony Imagesoft as well, which was renamed Sony Interactive Studios America in 1995 (and later 989 Studios) when they transitioned from being mostly a publisher to a developer.
Polys Entertainment, now known as Polyphony Digital, was an internal Sony studio formed in 1994. They developed Motor Toon GP, a launch title for PS1 in Japan.
Japan Studio was formed in 1993 and developed Crime Crackers as a launch title for PS1 in Japan.
I'm not sure this is a conclusive list.
He still overstates. @eastmen is bringing constantly the myth that its because of studios Sony bought that they were successful. But during the PS1 its only Psygnosis a purchase of such studio, which ironically was bringing a lot of its most successful IPs to competing platforms.
The other studios you mention were initially barebones, born within Sony and repurposed. So they are outside of @eastmen's argument.
The other exception was Namco which was a hardware synergy between the two companies.
The PS1's success was motsly due to the right price, the right hardware and an attractive environment for developers technically and financially. Thats exactly what they repeated with PS4 onwards.
Thats what MS hit the mark with the 360 and Sony failed with the PS3 and leveled up the market.
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Sorry, I was looking at it in terms of buying studios and making exclusive content, eastmen's argument. Sony didn't buy up studios and make deals to pay for PS1's success. Heck, a lot of early software internally published was multi-platform with Windows!
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