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Microsoft’s Activision Blizzard deal approved by UK regulators
(www.theverge.com)
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this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2023
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Laws against monopolies don't exist, anymore, eh?
Because this won't give MS a monopoly in the slightest. There's still tons of Devs and publisher's out there on various states of first, second and third party relationships with MS, Sony and Nintendo and new indie Devs pop up almost weekly. It gives them a massive advantage having CoD as a first party Gamepass title, yes, but that's not what a monopoly means.
People conflate monopoly when they should be saying oligopoly
After this deal MS will STILL be in third place.
3rd place in... What? I'm trying to search around to see what you're referring to here, but I can't find anything.
By total market cap, Microsoft already blows these companies out of the water. By just videogame divisions, Sony and Nintendo are way farther ahead because of hardware sales, but that doesn't really make sense to include in the conversation about acquiring a publisher. I can't find any solid numbers either way isolating publishing, other than that the top 5 in recent years seems to be Tencent, Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, and Activision/Blizzard (with EA hanging around too). Seems like any of those two merging is going to be bad for everyone other than shareholders.
Yes, third place in total gaming revenue. I agree it will be bad, but let's not pretend this is going to shift the market in a big way, because it won't.
How do you figure that 2 of the top 6 merging won't shift the market in a big way?
Also, total gaming revenue wouldn't be a good way to compare it because that includes revenue streams that's are unrelated to Activision/Blizzard. Microsoft is hardly even competing with Nintendo at all considering they don't have a handheld device. And Microsoft releases way more games on PC than Nintendo or even Sony, which further reduces the relevance of hardware sales.
It's the developing and publishing industries specifically that are going to be impacted by this, because that's what Activision/Blizzard does.
The impact to hardware sales will be indirect: I would guess a pretty small number amount of people might switch to Xbox or buy an Xbox in addition to a PlayStation just for version exclusives, but probably not a huge amount as long as Microsoft keeps COD on PlayStation.