- MS turned down the Marvel (Spider-Man) exclusive!! Why should governments intervene on MS making dumb choices?! The recent Spider-Man titles should not in any way be used in any exclusivity arguments as the situation around its existence has nothing to do with hard-core exclusivity dealings and buying up rights. And every time it's thrown up as an argument in MS's favour, it's just plain embarassing MS once again that they turned down Marvel!
Yes Sony turned down the Bethesda acquisition and the ABK acquisition. It doesn't matter if sonny was willing to pay for it because MS wasn't willing to pay for the Spider-man rights and you are saying tough luck there. So it would be the same thing.
Sony easily could have afforded Bethesda and not for nothing the rumor was that Sony was trying to purchase them before MS came in and bought them. The other rumor was that Sony was trying to make exclusivity deals for a bunch of IP from them. I also believe before the MS / ABK deal there were comments made that ABK was looking at other companies to purchase them and MS was the one that ultimately was interested and put in a compelling bid.
I have always been on the side if Company A buys developers then Company B should also be able to buy companies. If Company A makes exclusivity deals then Company B should be able to make the same purchase. I've also said that if Company B is in last place in the market and are blocked from buying other companies then Company A that is the market leader should certainly be even further restricted in what purchases they can make. A healthy market is when we have as many competitors as possible with as equal share as possible.
I don't and it seems a lot of the governments out there agree with me on this , but I don't see a way in which MS purchasing ABK drives Sony from the market. Sony outsells MS world wide by over 2:1 if not more. Last generation MS may not have hit 60m consoles while sony is close to 120m consoles I beileve and still selling them. To be honest with the 10 year contracts MS has offered I don't see that changing in any meaningful way from the ABK purchase in the next decade or more. While ABK has popular franchises MS is willing to tie up its largest onto competition platforms for 10 years. Diablo just released its latest game on playstation/xbox and pc. Their other big game WOW has been a pc exclusive for 20 years. The sequel to their other big hit is not doing that great having stirred up controversy with canceling hero mode. Also as I said every almost every regulator except the UK and US has said it was a non issue.
I only brought up spiderman because it was recent and a example of how inane that line of thinking is. Spiderman has had games all the way back to the atari. Should sony need to port Spiderman 2 to the atari vcs that came out recently or if the intellivison amiico ever came out? After all that IP showed up on the previous versions of those consoles.
Its just a decent into moving goal posts so that my fav company seems to be doing the right thing.
Look Sony could have bought Bethesda. As I said above the original rumors were that Sony was purchasing them. They could have bid for ABK as the original word was that ABK were looking for other offers above MS. But sony didn't do it. Just like MS didn't get the rights to Spiderman and now those games wont appear on the xbox. Maybe it sucks for MS fans but a ps5 is $400. It's not the end of the world financially or you can play it on geforce now with a sub. Same on the other side. It sucks that MS bought Bethesda but its even cheaper to buy an xbox series s , its $300 and sometimes as low as $200. Also you can play it on xcloud or geforce now.
