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The real issue is Sony has many exclusives which gives Microsoft a better case (despite the judge saying it's NOT about Sony).

It certainly harms consumers, so I don't see how the court still approved this especially with the judge's comment against the comparison to Sony. Almost all mergers of this size harm consumers, the fact that it's allowed by default is the crucial issue.

If the FTC still had a spine they would go after all of these kinds of exclusive deals - and not just limited to games.

The film industry was famously broken up such that the production companies couldn't own theaters yet in 2023 that rule (if it still exists) is so weak that most production companies have their streaming service and aggressively pressure theaters into exclusivity Windows.

At the end of the day this only strengthens the trend to PC gaming which only benefits Microsoft and can only hurt Sony. It would only be a minor surprise if Sony joined the Proton/WINE effort with Valve to get around Microsoft exclusives. (Which does help consumers but in a 3D chess kind of way).

A judge ended the rule that studios couldn't own theaters in 2020: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomnunan/2020/08/07/judge-decre...
> At the end of the day this only strengthens the trend to PC gaming which only benefits Microsoft and can only hurt Sony.

Microsoft and Sony aren't the only companies making video games.

Windows isn't the only PC operating system.

In large part thanks to Steam, a lot of video games work on Linux nowadays.

Sony is free to implement their OS in such a way that you can play PC games on Playstation. Of course Sony doesn't want that, because it is Sony's strategy to wall off their ecosystem.

SONY IS THE BAD GUY HERE.

Strengthening PC market is a good news for consumers. Strengthening Microsoft - not necessarily…

I disagree with the opinion that it harms consumers. The economist has an article it recently published that argues that this deal actually helps consumers by speeding up the transition to "streaming" games and cloud gaming as an option. I tend to agree. Just because one large company is buying another large company doesn't mean the deal should be blocked.
Uh that rule was based on a 75 year long 'temporary' agreement that has expired. That is another part of this whole Writers and Actors striking that the media isn't talking about. I think the agreement was to settle a case before the Supreme Court in 1948, it just ended and it is now Game On for the studios to take over the theaters again.
Microsoft employee here, opinions my own.

I work in gaming at Microsoft and I really enjoy it. I think Microsoft gives us a ton of space to explore and make our own impact and I am a huge fan* of Phil Spencer.

> Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision has been described as the largest in tech history. It deserves scrutiny. That scrutiny has paid off: Microsoft has committed in writing, in public, and in court to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation for 10 years on parity with Xbox.

How does this make anyone feel any better? What happens after 10 years? Microsoft has been around for 4x that long.

> How does this make anyone feel any better? What happens after 10 years?

What happens in less than 10 years if they don't abide by it?

Does Activision get split back out? I doubt it.

We're long past the point where you can just set rules/laws and companies will abide by it. We need to be at the point where we also list the punishment ahead of time.

Why would you be a huge fan of the man who’s single handedly responsible for sinking the Xbox IP ship to the point of having to monopolize the industry to right the ship?

I’m surprised people didn’t wake up with the One era lies he kept pushing, and given HNs general distaste for “marketer talk”, how can one be a fan of a dude that every time he opens his mouth, it’s marketing talk (when it’s not a lie). This dude would constantly say shit like “the console wars are stupid. We need to all get along”. And then when pressed about “hidden DGPU” that he knew didn’t exist, he lies and responds “we are not letting Sony have a hardware advantage”. This dude is a scumbag.

He’s been terrible for Xbox, and now his horrid management of Xbox has led to being terrible for gaming in general.

Big fan? Nah.

Yeah. Looking at past form, after the MS anti-trust agreement in the EU expired (the browser choice one), MS have now gone all-in to force Edge down everyone's throat.

They're clearly "Ok, we have more room to legally get away with XYZ now so LETS GO FOR IT!!!!".

The judge considers it reasonable because if the market is as the FTC defines it and if Call of Duty is actually an essential input for a competitor in the "high-performance gaming console" space, then those commitments from Microsoft give Sony ten years to innovate and come up with a replacement for CoD. It makes a lot more sense if you read the whole judgement, Judge Corley is basically saying "Most of what the FTC is asserting is questionable, but even if we assume that their assertions are correct, the argument to temporarily prevent & potentially permanently ban the deal to prevent harm there is little evidence for is not strong enough to harm Microsoft and Activision in this way". There's other stuff that had some impact as well, like how the FTC knew the deals deadline (six days from now) more than a year ago, but only chose to bring the PI motion recently, giving Microsoft barely any time to prepare (and making the federal judge in this case have to work some unusual hours, including the entire weekend, because it's now so time critical). Basically, a lot more went into this decision than just the ten year agreements.
> I am a huge can of Phil Spencer

I'm sure Phil Spencer will be interested to know that he can fit into a can :)

A snippet from the case

"FTC: We've heard about the harms to Sony...

Judge: This is about the harms to the consumer not to Sony. Let's take a break until 4:05."

This is weird. The judge says that because there won’t be any anticompetitive effects in the next 10 years (because MS made a pinky promise), this merger is fine?

What about after those 10 years? What about anything not Call of Duty?

The FTC's incredibly low win rate in federal court should be a source of agency-wide embarrassment. The only place they reliably win is their kangaroo "administrative courts" in which they act as the judge, jury and executioner but those are probably on their way out. But it doesn't even matter anyways because the new strategy is going to be outsourcing enforcement to Europe.
This is a great decision for the US game industry. Sony has a ton of exclusives, many from acquisitions, and strengthening XBOX will help maintain a competitive gaming market which should lead to even better exclusives in the long run. Some of the best rivalries in the history of gaming came from different sides with hard hitting exclusives (SNES vs Genesis for instance).

While Microsoft has promised to keep Call of Duty on the Playstation, I think it would be totally ok if they stopped doing that in the future, as any other Activision-Blizzard game; after all, Uncharted and Last of Us aren't available on the XBOX either.

>The court ruling even agrees with Microsoft in theory about the Nintendo Switch being part of the console market, but also accepts the FTC can reasonably claim it’s not.

How is the Switch not a console?

Understandable. Nintendo is full of exclusives + it's the best selling console too (by the court's admission) and that's ok so as MS buying Actiblizz. Otherwise I don't know how would Nintendo get a pass lol, they are the worst with exclusives (and what ends up on mobile is p2w thrash)

>If the Court was the final decisionmaker on the merits, it would likely find Nintendo Switch part of the relevant market. But it is not. Instead, on a 13(b) preliminary injunction, the FTC need only make a “tenable showing that the relevant market” is Gen 9 consoles. Given the plethora of internal industry documents and the acknowledged differences, the FTC has met its preliminary injunction burden to show the Switch is not included in the relevant market.

>Nintendo made “technical decisions to enable an experience that they thought their customers would want to have, and it’s the best selling console right now in the market. So when I — when people try to tell me it’s not competition — competitive, for any number of reasons, I don’t believe that because I just look at what’s selling

The judges son works for Microsoft. This is not only conflict of interest but corruption at its absolute core. I knew the FTC would lose this case. I am not surprised.

It does not matter if the FTC had a case or not. I do not believe it received a fair trail.

Just the UK CMA standing in the way then, with its flimsy decision resting almost entirely on speculation about the "cloud gaming" market.

Microsoft should be offering to to swear off cloud gaming entirely, they should be delighted. Game streaming is a lousy solution that requires enormous investment in specific infrastructure, it would be smart to ignore it and focus on their great subscription service that only requires a $500 Xbox.

This fight isn't over yet. Nevermind the misleading title. The fight is only beginning. FTC lost on the injunction, which was only sought when MSFT brazenly threatened to close the deal when it learned it would not be approved. MSFT still has a monkey on their back. Khan is far from giving up. Perhaps FTC can get a stay pending an appeal to the 9th Cir. The July 18 deadline to close is rapidly approaching.
I find the whole thing to be a tempest in a teapot -- why is the FTC involved in this at all? For christ's sake it's a video game! If we were discussing access to some critical resource I would understand, but how is this not a criminal waste of our government's time and resources? It reminds me of the congressional baseball steroid hearings.

Am I totally off base here? Can anyone explain to me why this case is so critical?

I have hope that Blizzard revives the Starcraft franchise. The RTS genre needs some love atm.
As much as i want Blizzard games included in Game Pass, this will end up resulting in lower quality games titles . Fewer studios are going to be able to compete
Meh, maybe with Microsoft's kind of accessibility support, Blizard can get more of a go-ahead to make Hearthstone, and other games, accessible. We've seen with the GuideDev Hearthstone mod that it's possible.
Now Zork belongs to MS. Release it under MIT and everyone would win a great history of gaming (and the right to create new histories in the Zorkverse without worrying). Spiritwrak it's a good example. In case of anyone says "text adventures have no future"... the folk lore from a distant past made Disney rich. The Arturian legends plus some samurai touches set into a futuristic space made George Lucas and Lucasfilms loaded, too.
Maybe it's just sour grapes from me, but it feels like a lot of these acquisitions are for has-been companies that were great 10+ years ago but haven't had much success lately. Bethesda, Double Fine, and now Activation Blizzard.
Someone please correct me if I'm way off the mark here: I assume the reason behind this purchase is to keep Windows relevant as a gaming platform. It looks as though Windows is becoming less relevant overall as a computing platform, and alternative platforms such as Steam Deck are beginning to pose a major threat to one of their major market demographics: Gaming.
We know from history that exclusives are incredibly important in the console industry.

Microsoft buying ATVI will net them ownership over one of the most important game IPs of the last three console generations.

The only way this decision makes any sense is that the courts are somehow thinking that 10 years is long enough and things will be different by the time MS is in the position to tilt the deck to their favour by making parts of or the entirety of this franchise a platform exclusive.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is already 16 years old, so the courts are likely wrong as this franchise clearly has remarkable staying power to still be this relevant.

This is a very good thing for gamers. It reminds me of the Sprint/T-mobile merger, which was a huge win for consumers, allowing T-mobile to actually put pressure on ATT and Verizon.

Activision is a terrible company whose iron grip on their beloved IP (bought from Blizzard and Infinity Ward) has been absolutely stifling to the industry. They are almost singlehandedly responsible for everything that sucks about gaming now.

I was curious how the UK CMA judgement affects this, and found this https://twitter.com/BradSmi/status/1678796043545350144
Is this hyper-competitive or anti-competetive?

The objective of business is to win, but if a business is too dominant, then they have the ability to extort customers.

I don't see how customer extortion is born out of this. It's fair and in the spirit of a healthy ecosystem.

Its a bit late to jump in here, but I would just like to share the observation that 90% of the comments here look like they were crafted by Microsoft's PR deparment.

The rule expecting good faith arguments is entirely moot if corporate players can sic their squads of goons on social media.

Almost every comment is something like: "Well, big corporations gonna be corporating, what you gonna do?" or "MS is bad, but are they as bad as [Insert distraction here]" or "I love this move, please promote me microsoft."

And here people will still believe this isn't happening, when the evidence is clear to see for anyone with a slightly skeptical mind.

Microsoft still needs more studios to make Game Pass a “Netflix for Gaming” service. WoW and CoD and the rest of the ActiBlizz back catalog help but Microsoft still doesn’t have enough studios to be pumping out a new major release every month.
Microsoft saw Sony’s acquisition of Bungie as open season and they’re making moves now to compete. Good for them.
Sporadic thoughts:

I'm not impressed with Sony's tantrums over this, they've been throwing money around for exclusivity for years, ranging from exclusive content in major titles (Destiny and CoD have often been 'definitive' on PlayStation) to outright title exclusivity.

I'm probably not a good source of opinion on this, Acti-Blizz has become a toxic company that doesn't really make games I like anymore, and I resent them for holding Heretic and Hexen hostage even during this renaissance of throw back FPSs.. there's too much money to be made elsewhere for them to do something like that.. maybe I'm being suckered but seeing Phil in that Hexen tshirt made me hopeful. I'm also an old and bitter Warcraft RTS fan, they ignored RTS Warcraft entirely for years after WoW became their focus, and when they finally did give Warcraft III attention they completely destroyed the community and arguably made the game worse for everybody. They could have done absolutely nothing and everything would be better!

In short, unless I was a big fan of their current offerings (I am not) I don't see how Microsoft could possibly make things worse, so I'm slightly optimistic about the changes this acquisition will bring. Worst case scenario the dumpster fire gets bigger. I'm sure people who love the current offerings have very different feelings about this.

Can’t wait to login to d4 with outlook.
I just want sony to free bloodborne from the playstation chains, microsoft can own the shithole that activision is for all i care
I know it is just wishful thinking but I hope Microsoft restore legacy warcraft 3 so I can play the original campaigns and not the hot mess they made with reforged.
How could closing the deal look like in practice while the UK is blocking it? Would that mean Microsoft can't sell Activision Blizzard games in the UK?
I know nothing will happen, but I can dream that after the Microsoft owns World of Warcraft it will move back towards the old form.
Turns out appointing a hipster anti-trust activist with minimal experience to head the FTC wasn't a brilliant idea.
They ruined bethesda, they're going to ruin... Oh wait bliz is already optimized for money and delivering garbage content
real reason merges happen is to the benefit of the stockholders looking to cash out on their life time investment in a particular company

honestly this create an economic boon upon closure more tax from sales win-win

but if the acquisition doesn't succeed it is fine too Activision is in a good stance as its titles have been doing better than most

Welp, that's a wrap!

When, not if Call of Duty and many others Activision Blizzard has goes Xbox and PC exclusive, some people are going to get pies and eggs on their faces that is for sure. Also more consolidation of the gaming industry isn't good in the long run as it clearly opens the door for the big players to buy up even more assets. I can clearly see Microsoft buy EA, Sega and Square Enix now as a example.

Very bad for end consumer in long term.
That’s quite a turn of event, but MS is proven suck at making games so there is the argument