11th July 2023, 6:06 PM
(This post was last modified: 11th July 2023, 6:13 PM by A Black Falcon.)
So, last year Microsoft announced it was going to buy Activision-Blizzard-King for $65 billion. This set off a long process of getting the merger approved by regulators all over the world. Most ended up approving it, but two, the UK's CMA and the US's FTC, tried to stop it. The legal process in the US is for a court case to decide the result, and today the judge came back with her ruling: the FTC's request for an injunction to stop the merger is denied. The FTC's case was pretty poorly presented at the trial, which was mostly livestreamed and had some interesting stuff come up because of it, so this result is not surprising at all. The FTC focused its case on Call of Duty and how much Microsoft could get from getting ahold of that series, but Microsoft insisted that CoD would stay multiplatform for at least a decade, which I believe; they'll probably treat CoD like Minecraft. Other Activision and Blizzard stuff will probably go PC/Xbox-only, but not CoD for a long time.
(Meanwhile, MS also said that King's mobile games were actually probably the number one reason why they want to buy the company.)
Meanwhile, as for the UK regulator, the CMA, it seems that they are going back into negotiations with Microsoft, so maybe now that they know they're the only regulator trying to stop the deal and that their case was incredibly bad -- basically the CMA focused their rejection entirely on how it'd give Microsoft too much power in cloud gaming, even though there is no proof that cloud gaming is going anywhere -- maybe they'll back down now. I hope so, that's an absurd reason to block the deal over.
What do I think about the merger, though? As I have said before, Activision and Blizzard have a very poor track record of how they have treated their employees over the past two decades or so. Microsoft is certainly also flawed in that respect, but they're no Activision, so it should be good for Activision's workers if the merger goes through. Additionally this should get Bobby "I love Republicans and don't care about harassment at my workplace" Kotick out of the industry, which would be great. Kotick, who remember is the longest-termed CEO in the tech industry, did some good things back in the '90s when he saved Activision and led them to make a series of fantastic games, most notably MechWarrior II among others, but for several decades now every story about him has been bad. It's either about his support for Republican causes, giving jobs to awful people, not doing much about the bad work environment at his company for women and such, how he makes insanely huge salaries (like what was it $150 million a year?), etc, etc... if this gets him out, even with a golden parachute, I'm in favor.
On the other hand, having the very first third party videogame developer, and a company that is one of the largest third parties, get bought up by a first party really says a lot about how this industry is going. AAA development has gotten absurdly expensive, beyond the means of all but the largest companies. And so mergers continue as studios get larger and larger and fewer and fewer companies buy up as many of the major studios as they can. This is a bad trend, and Microsoft and Sony are both guilty of encouraging it, but considering how expensive development is now I understand why it's happening, unfortunately. There's probably not much that can be done so long as development costs stay high, and I can't see them going down unless there's a crash or something!
The result of mergers like this will be even longer dev times and even more expensive development for the increasingly small number of titles in the AAA(AA) space. But what can you do? People want the best graphics, the largest worlds, and such, and that costs a lot in money and time. I hope that it also results in more smaller games as well though, which it could -- ActiVision has basically done nothing with any of its back catalog in recent years, they only make CoD. I hope MS uses some of their many good older IPs for either new games or classic collections. An Atari 50-like collection of Activision classics would be a fantastic start, for instance...
(Meanwhile, MS also said that King's mobile games were actually probably the number one reason why they want to buy the company.)
Meanwhile, as for the UK regulator, the CMA, it seems that they are going back into negotiations with Microsoft, so maybe now that they know they're the only regulator trying to stop the deal and that their case was incredibly bad -- basically the CMA focused their rejection entirely on how it'd give Microsoft too much power in cloud gaming, even though there is no proof that cloud gaming is going anywhere -- maybe they'll back down now. I hope so, that's an absurd reason to block the deal over.
What do I think about the merger, though? As I have said before, Activision and Blizzard have a very poor track record of how they have treated their employees over the past two decades or so. Microsoft is certainly also flawed in that respect, but they're no Activision, so it should be good for Activision's workers if the merger goes through. Additionally this should get Bobby "I love Republicans and don't care about harassment at my workplace" Kotick out of the industry, which would be great. Kotick, who remember is the longest-termed CEO in the tech industry, did some good things back in the '90s when he saved Activision and led them to make a series of fantastic games, most notably MechWarrior II among others, but for several decades now every story about him has been bad. It's either about his support for Republican causes, giving jobs to awful people, not doing much about the bad work environment at his company for women and such, how he makes insanely huge salaries (like what was it $150 million a year?), etc, etc... if this gets him out, even with a golden parachute, I'm in favor.
On the other hand, having the very first third party videogame developer, and a company that is one of the largest third parties, get bought up by a first party really says a lot about how this industry is going. AAA development has gotten absurdly expensive, beyond the means of all but the largest companies. And so mergers continue as studios get larger and larger and fewer and fewer companies buy up as many of the major studios as they can. This is a bad trend, and Microsoft and Sony are both guilty of encouraging it, but considering how expensive development is now I understand why it's happening, unfortunately. There's probably not much that can be done so long as development costs stay high, and I can't see them going down unless there's a crash or something!
The result of mergers like this will be even longer dev times and even more expensive development for the increasingly small number of titles in the AAA(AA) space. But what can you do? People want the best graphics, the largest worlds, and such, and that costs a lot in money and time. I hope that it also results in more smaller games as well though, which it could -- ActiVision has basically done nothing with any of its back catalog in recent years, they only make CoD. I hope MS uses some of their many good older IPs for either new games or classic collections. An Atari 50-like collection of Activision classics would be a fantastic start, for instance...
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