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

[Deleted member 11852]

How does that work when EU single market policy dictates freedom of movement between goods and services ?

Because allowing one party to heavily invest, or acquire, another party has nothing to do with the principles of freedom of movement of goods and services.

I'm pretty sure CMA can't unilaterally overrule on M&A cases like this since that undermines the jurisdiction of the EU commission.

As somebody who spent a lot of times in Brussels before the UK left the EU, you should know there is a lot of overlap on various policy areas where members states are generally unwilling to cede full authority to the EU. Monopolies and mergers is a particularly contentious issue because of economic coercion through malicious foreign investment which is very much a national security issue for most countries and therefore falls into that policy area that member states will not cede to Brussels.

I am almost certain that the CMA did not have as much power then as it does now when leaving the single market ...

No, it didn't, it had far less and far less than many other territories. The UK has been fairly pedestrian in reviewing and updating it's monopolies legislation, until the changes that came in today (1 May 2023), the Competition Act 1998 has large been unchanged for 25 years, and a lot has changed in that time.

As a Brit, I enjoy a good choice of electricity suppliers, water providers, gas providers, mobile and fixed telecom providers and cable/internet service providers and the reason there is competition in all these essential utility spaces is because of competition law breaking down what were once big massive organisations that had a vicelike grip on industries giving consumers almost no choice.

 

[Shortbread]

Weighing in some more, I still don't think it's a certainty that this is done.

The CMA tries to say that in 10-15 years, this will happen or that will happen, in a hypothetical sense.

However, the Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) says this.

https://www.catribunal.org.uk/sites/cat/files/2022-06/20220614_1429_Judgment_FINAL%20%5B2022%5D%20CAT%2026.pdf

That's outside the purview that CAT has given the CMA to go by in terms of time and not one of you here think that this is going to be the last generation of hardware from either Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo.



See, all of these companies are all over the place with their projections of when the cloud is supposed to take off but the CMA, a group of people outside of the industry is going to know the industry better than the industry people? Also, that's outside of consideration for 5 years too.

The CMA ultimately took every conceivable hypothetical and weighed it against Microsoft. I'm not saying that Microsoft is going to ultimately win anything, but I do believe that the CMA is going to have to revisit a lot of this because CAT will rule in Microsoft's favor in a large degree.

The entire argument is that Activision makes Microsoft's cloud business unbeatable, mainly off the strength of Call of Duty, which is patently absurd. That is the CMA's single theory of harm. WiiU had COD, sold 10 million. Switch doesn't have COD, sold over 100 million. CMA is going to have to answer for a lot of these answers is what I think.

Even if Microsoft wins an appeal with CAT, they'll just kick it back to the CMA and the CMA will clean up whatever 'perceived errors' and still deny the acquisition. It's no longer just the CMA standing by themselves, UK officials/heads are very supportive of this decision and CMA's independence. IMHO, it's a wrap there.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

But I mean I don’t think it’s untrue here. Since brexit CMA is making a decision wholly on its own now. It only needs to look after UKs own needs as opposed to having to look after EUs. Because of that decision criteria on acceptance could be different.

The CMA never looked after the EU's interests.

It has been said so many times in this thread that each regulator is only looking, and at its own market and this is why some regulators ruled really quickly, because the video games markets in those territories is incredible small that it really has next to no bearing on those individual market. The more complex videogame markets are taking much longer. The EU rarely takes longer that its prescribed time to rule and this second delay is I think unprecedented.

Even if Microsoft wins an appeal with CAT, they'll just kick It back to the CMA and the CMA will clean up whatever errors that are perceived and still deny the acquisition. It's no longer just the CMA standing by themselves, UK officials/heads are very supportive of this decision and CMA's independence. IMHO, it's a wrap there.

If the CMA's decision was sound but there was procedural errors or factual inaccuracies that do not affect the decisions, this is 100% what will happen. And issues like this should be reviewed and corrected.

If theses some monumental error that could change the overall assessment, that's different but mostly what I'm seeing reported from the non-hyperbolic press is minor stuff. It's not helping Microsoft's case that all of the statements of support for Microsoft are coming from parties who have something to gain by the deal being approved which doesn't make them look particularly balanced.

Fascinating stuff to observe.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

As a Brit, I enjoy a good choice of electricity suppliers, water providers, gas providers, mobile and fixed telecom providers and cable/internet service providers and the reason there is competition in all these essential utility spaces is because of competition law breaking down what were once big massive organisations that had a vicelike grip on industries giving consumers almost no choice.

Which then rake in massive profits and abuse the poorest, where a nationalised service could provide essential services at cost to the populace...

Yes, that's a call to nationalise British gaming! What you got, Sir Sinclair??

 

[nutball]

Which then rake in massive profits and abuse the poorest, where a nationalised service could provide essential services at cost to the populace...

In an ideal world, yes. I'm not a massive fan of privatisation of essential utilities, but on the other hand I am old enough to remember the 1970s when we had the socialist version of nationalisation. They basically became job programmes, so the "at cost" bit didn't work quite as well as it could/should.

Maybe there's a better halfway house, like majority state-owned private companies. I believe there are some examples of these in Europe (EDF? DB?). I'm sure they have their faults, I'd be interested to know what those might be.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Not sure about MGS, but FFVII was an exclusive.

It wasn't money-hatted. As I said, Sony had the right product and won developers over. There were technical reasons and Square wree struggling to get their vision on N64. Then this wild-card appears with CD and apparently a nicer way of dealing with developers and devs gave PS a shot.

Final Fantasy 7: An oral history

An inside look at the creation and fallout of Square's industry-defining role-playing game, as told by those who were there.

www.polygon.com

Sony's game for control back then was to either sign an exclusive deal that simply involved not releasing on rival consoles, or a deal to publish the game, thus making it an exclusive.

Their game for control wasn't particularly, just good businessing overall. They played some big titles, and some little, but mostly they dealt well with developers. This is clear in all retros where devs talk about that time, where Sony were this open new player with an east to develop for platform versus controlling, difficult Nintendo with their expensive cartridge-based system.

 

[iroboto]

The CMA never looked after the EU's interests.

It has been said so many times in this thread that each regulator is only looking, and at its own market and this is why some regulators ruled really quickly, because the video games markets in those territories is incredible small that it really has next to no bearing on those individual market. The more complex videogame markets are taking much longer. The EU rarely takes longer that its prescribed time to rule and this second delay is I think unprecedented.

Interesting. For some reason I thought it was done as a group back then, I didn’t see CMA having a separate ruling on Bethseda. Now I don’t understand why they weren’t looking at this and only the EU

 

[iroboto]

where a nationalised service could provide essential services at cost to the populace

Lol goodness.

Cloud gaming an essential service lol.

The posters here spend more time and money on B3D than they do on cloud gaming.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Which then rake in massive profits and abuse the poorest, where a nationalised service could provide essential services at cost to the populace...

Docoupling telecoms from BT (British Telecom) and siloing infrastructure into OpenReach worked well for telephones and ISPs. Other privatisations, like rail, was not successful. Is it worse than if British Rail was still a thing? It's hard to imagine it being any worse, but in general having a choice means companies have to compete whereas otherwise they don't.. If you've eery lived in the US even for a few months, you realise how much better Europe is in terms of choice of utility providers. In the US, for a lot of the population, there is no choice. You pay company X whatever they demand for internet or you don't have internet.

And btw Clive Sinclair is dead.

 

[JPT]

The problem is always going to be latency and there is always going to be an absolute limit with the physics of transmission (2 way round trip) on top of that induced by actual hardware and logic (transcoding the video feed, the hardware it's run on, not to mention the game code itself, etc.). Without some sort of quantum tunneling it's always going to be significantly worse on cloud than on console, even assume you get to the point where transcoding the video happens instantaneously with no delay and with imperceivable graphical impairments.

The question is, why would I?

Regards,
SB

I guess the question is for the average gamer and not anybody that frequents this forum. Our standards are higher, wether rightly so or not

 

[Lurkmass]

Because allowing one party to heavily invest, or acquire, another party has nothing to do with the principles of freedom of movement of goods and services.

It absolutely has everything to with being able to review investments and acquisitions. Can't have every national regulator within a trading bloc making independent rulings otherwise you'll see rampant smuggling of 'contraband' within the trading bloc ...

As somebody who spent a lot of times in Brussels before the UK left the EU, you should know there is a lot of overlap on various policy areas where members states are generally unwilling to cede full authority to the EU. Monopolies and mergers is a particularly contentious issue because of economic coercion through malicious foreign investment which is very much a national security issue for most countries and therefore falls into that policy area that member states will not cede to Brussels.

A single member state must NEVER threaten the primacy of the EU commission's authority on the bloc's trading policy as it's a violation of EU law ...

Member states don't have a choice but to follow a unified EU-wide trade policy so there's very little regulatory divergence to be seen ...

Interesting. For some reason I thought it was done as a group back then, I didn’t see CMA having a separate ruling on Bethseda. Now I don’t understand why they weren’t looking at this and only the EU

The CMA didn't have the authority to review M&A cases spanning the entire European trading bloc. The CMA wasn't able to review all M&A cases independently from the EU until a trade cooperation agreement between them came into effect during May 1st, 2021 which was after the date when Microsoft closed their deal with Zenimax Media on March 9th, 2021 ...

 

[Shifty Geezer]

And btw Clive Sinclair is dead.

I know. Maybe everyone's getting too serious here?

 

[Nesh]

Not sure about MGS, but FFVII was an exclusive. Not only does it say "It's only on Playstation" on the original cover art, it was published by Sony. Google "Final Fantasy VII Cover Art Misprint" and you should find a scan or pic of the original back artwork with "And it's only on Playstation" right below the misplaced "i" in masterpiece.

We went through this before from actual interviews from Square itself in this very thread which prove exactly otherwise. Everything else is in the realm of assumption. The game also saw a release on PC in the same generation.
edit: here it is https://www.polygon.com/a/final-fantasy-7
Edit: Also in Wikipedia

The game had no chance arriving on Nintendo due to hardware. Square really tried to work with Nintendo but the hardware wasnt up to snuff and nothing would have changed Nintendo's decision.

 

[see colon]

It wasn't money-hatted. As I said, Sony had the right product and won developers over. There were technical reasons and Square wree struggling to get their vision on N64. Then this wild-card appears with CD and apparently a nicer way of dealing with developers and devs gave PS a shot.

I don't know what the technical definition of money-hatted is. All I know is that there was a financial transaction that ensured Final Fantasy VII was a timed exclusive to Playstation through a publishing deal, where Sony had international console publishing rights to it and other Square games through a financial agreement.

To think that Square couldn't have made a compelling RPG on a cartridge ignores it's history of making compelling RPGs on cartridges. Obviously if FFVII were to remained on N64 it would have been a different game then the one released on Playstation, for better or for worse. Even if the vision of FFVII could only be realized using the larger file size of CDROM, why didn't square release some of it's smaller games, like the classic FF collections, or FF Tactics? Those games would later get ported to GBA, so it isn't like the storage size was a limiting factor in their release.

 

[Inuhanyou]

The Sony and Nintendo split was obvious from the start. Sony came out swinging with great content, a very low market entree price and got publishers who were not interested in being chained to Nintendo again for various reasons on their side.

It was the same for Sega previously against Nintendo and the same for MS later on in the PS3 era when a lot of games that were once ps exclusive became multiplat either because MS paid money for it(tales of vesperia, eternal sonata, star ocean 4) or because the PS3 came in hot, late and in unknown quantity which allowed the 360 to take a lot of the market share with its lower price and more appealing hardware. Those were good days.


For the current situation, we keep going back to falsely equating permanently securing entire publishers worth of development houses with a few games being platform exclusive through a deal which is very silly considering how many of those types of deals are done through the industry with every publisher and the former have far more reaching impacts to the future transforming landscape than the latter.

Nothing is stopping Xbox from doing the same things as PlayStation with content besides not being as popular a place to play games. They could have in the past easily taken steps to amend this and even now, but refuse to do so.

On the very face of things, they still, 20 plus years later, don't even exist to sell their product in as many places as PlayStation has opened up the market to. And that is a clear choice of theirs to ignore certain markets in favor of the US and the UK over many years. Even many of the places they sell to has very bad and lacklustre support like language and storefront roadblocks which make no sense and are not conductive to fostering a proper ecosystem.

I think MS need to realize that and take steps to amend those problems before trying to force the market to them through huge mergers rather than appealing to the market through actual interest.

The only thing Bethesda and the ABK deal say to me is that MS largely gave up trying and instead are content merely to eat what was previously neutral ground giving consumers no choice but to join the Xbox ecosystem in one way or another and are priming themselves to be the leader of future emerging trends by force. Which I guess isn't new for MS but is something plenty take issue with.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

To think that Square couldn't have made a compelling RPG on a cartridge ignores it's history of making compelling RPGs on cartridges.

To carry on this argument is to go against everything we've been told by the people who made the game! I guess the payouts include NDA clauses where to tell the truth is to suffer the wrath of Sony's ninjas, so all the devs are making up stories about technical reasons!

 

[Nesh]

To think that Square couldn't have made a compelling RPG on a cartridge ignores it's history of making compelling RPGs on cartridges.

They could. But why would they? Why would they remain on a far limiting outdated cartridge when CD was the future and a hardware that was not up to the performance when you have one hardware to focus on that meets all the criteria and has all the install base?
It made no business sense.
If you go through the interview, Sony also required far less royalties than Nintendo did.
They said that it also made business sense for them to fully support Sony and make that platform win. Square released many many many titles exclusively on the PS1. Which shows that it was Square's conscious decision. It seems unlikely that Sony was money hatting every single Square game,
It is evident that Square wanted to support that platform fully because it ticked all the boxes. Sony was involved to promote and market FF7 outside of Japan, which is probably why in some games we see Sony co-publishing. Not dissimilar from Sony publishing CoD games in Japan. Electronic Arts then took the mantle of marketing and bringing these titles to the west and hence why we saw Square EA publishing the next Square games on PS1.
A lot of developers were unhappy with Nintendo's support and royalty requirements back then too. And thats why many other third party titltes were seeing PS1 releases and not N64 releases

 

[chris1515]

Sony won because they killed the cartdrige business model where the distributor Nintendo had much more power than the third party publisher. The advantage of CD was the size too, FF7 would have been impossible to make on cartdrige.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

This is definitely getting too off-topic. I doubt the minds of people who see parallels between Sony's appearance in the console market and MS's acquisition of ABK, and those who don't, are going to be changed by talking about it. No consensus will be reached shedding light on current developments, so let's axe that and return to what MS are doing, what the regulators are doing, and where MS go from here.

 

[iroboto]

The CMA didn't have the authority to review M&A cases spanning the entire European trading bloc. The CMA wasn't able to review all M&A cases independently from the EU until a trade cooperation agreement between them came into effect during May 1st, 2021 which was after the date when Microsoft closed their deal with Zenimax Media on March 9th, 2021 ...

Thank you. That's an important bit of knowledge there to keep in mind. So just to clarify: everything prior to May 1st, 2021 they weren't allowed to independently review them all, what typically happened in that case? Did they even see the case? or had a say on it?