Yes it’s bigger than entertainment.
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They’re gonna have to make up some serious ground though, I have never seen Xbox do so bad compared to PlayStation in the freaking USA, even the Xbox One wasn’t far behind the PS4 here and the PS4 had some extremely popular exclusives and the most popular marketing deals, Series consoles have neither, they gotta do something quick if they don’t want their market share to be even worse than last gen.
Outside of the context of the merger, CMA is penalizing MS for investing into gaming in the most efficient way to the advantage of incumbents and other tech giants that don’t take gaming or cloud gaming as seriously.
Back in the context of the merger, MS needs to raise the question to the CMA why is the merger in cloud gaming anti-competitive when largest market participants chooses not to and have no incentive to compete equally. It should be only anti-competitive if Amazon, Google, Netflix, Sony, Apple, and Nvidia can’t compete despite devoting the same resources.
If you are going to speculate about the future, you need to speculate about new entrants or old entrants with renewed incentives, with deep pockets and infra advantage.
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This may be probably stupid but could Microsoft go the CMA (in the case of being allowed to present new remedies) and say: “Hey, ok, in order not to “harm competition” I am not adding ABK games to my cloud service (or any, obviously) for X amount of time”?
All I’m going to say is my da’s homeland has been, and continues to be, a great place for business (it’s why Apple’s European HQ is in Cork)… though something something tax loopholes 
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Supply constraints. That’s like 90% of the reason.
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Thank you. Especially in regards to the easiest pushback of the “xbox is being shuttered” narratives. This was a bonus if they can/could get the deal through, nothing more. Prior to Nov 21, ABK’s acquisition was never part of the plan that’s been rolling out over the last few years.
With the deepest respect as well… you’re absolutely right, and I’ll make sure the occasional reminder is given. The parties in question however were in the discussion when all three warnings went out before, so it was a broader statement to avoid singling out individuals.
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When is the EU regulators deadline again?
May 22nd
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And hopefully it will be a welcome early-birthday present 
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That’s so far away 
It’s already a pain seeing the Xbox hater accounts talking constantly about the CMA block with absolute delight. Lol.
Really hope the CMA decision is overturned, and soon.
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I would hope the EU accepts it (china too, which I think they will given ABK has pulled out of China there shouldn’t be an issue) . The FTC aside it would be great to point out how …what 18 or so Regulators around the world either had no issues or were resolved with remedies and 99% of the issues the CMA brought up were not even mentioned.
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As well as the fact that there’s numerous mistakes in the CMA’s decision.
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Yep, this could lead to future tech-startups excluding not just investment in the UK, but excluding their services altogether from the UK.
Why take the risk of starting a business here, to create an emerging market, when years later, the CMA can kill your chances of expanding your operations via mergers or acquisitions? Not just locally, but globally? With limited grounds for appeal?
Now add on Brexit to all that and I wouldn’t blame startups for avoiding the UK and CMA altogether.
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FTC and CMA have main character syndrome. They honestly think deep down that they’re doing a service to it’s people by blocking it lol.
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While I have no doubt that Xbox would prefer to have a much higher market share in consoles, they clearly don’t care about console sales as much as Sony and Xbox fans seem to care about console sales. The reality is the Xbox brand is more than just consoles. As long as services continue to grow, software continues to sell on Xbox/PC, Microsoft will be happy.
Also, Microsoft reported that Xbox subscriptions made over a $1B in revenue this quarter. They also stated that supply constraints continue to be a factor for the drop in console sales. So think about that for a second - $1B in revenue, without a single AAA release since Halo Infinite in 2021 and supply constraints. Makes you wonder what that will look like when titles like Redfall, Starfield and Forza release, in tandem with hopefully more consoles available.
Finally, despite the celebration of record PS5 sales this quarter by certain individuals on Twitter, Sony has also stated that software sales fell 3.5%. It doesn’t matter how many consoles you sell if nobody is buying the software.
Toyo Securities analyst Hideki Yasuda said sluggish sales of videogame software, which is more profitable than the console side, cast a shadow over the game unit.
In the latest quarter to March, PlayStation 5 sales more than trebled from a year earlier to 6.3 million units, while software sales fell 3.5%.
“If you buy new hardware, you generally buy software as well. Software sales ought to have grown in tandem with hardware,” Yasuda said.
Sony expects profit to slip despite record PlayStation 5 sales (yahoo.com)
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Okay, so here’s something that Ive been thinking about since the block. I didn’t want to come off as overly negative or attacking of Microsoft so I have sat on it for a while to stew on my thoughts. At this point I am confident that these are not overreactions and based on a clear mind for the situation that Microsoft finds themselves in.
There are a number of areas where Microsoft has absolutely messed up. The first place they messed up was proceeding with this acquisition in the regulatory and competitive environment at the time. Not only did they underestimate their closest competition in gaming, they underestimated the lengths that regulatory bodies were willing to go in order to attack big tech. They made the mistake thinking they were friendly with both their xompetitora and regulators. These are embarrassing errors and show a shocking lack of awareness.
With that being said, this deal STILL could have gotten done if Microsoft literally exhausted their opportunties each step of the way. The first should have been swift and immediate awareness that they needed the politicians on their aide and screaming in support of this deal. There are legal ways to ensure that happens such as investing in the politicians backyards and making the donations you can. They already donate and invest a lot, but there was a lot left on the table and if they had favors to call in they didnt do so until they wanted Sony investigated, which is way too late in the game.
Now process wise, they messed up BIG time. They did not do all they could in order to ensure that arguments against them were dismissed. In particular, Microsoft played ball this entire time with the nascent cloud market. They need alto aggressively dismantle that argument. Instead they fed into it by talking so publicly over and over about cloud and how big they thought cloud would be. They didnt just stay quite and let the regulatory process play out, instead they talked and had their qords ised against them. Thats just poor planning and strategizing. Likewise, giving the regulators more ammo for their biggest point, cloud gaming, by deciding to try free to play games on cloud while the acquisition in process is a legendary level of dumb, you increased market share at a time when Google was exiting, what were they thinking?
Staying with the cloud angle, they didnt do anything to refute the marketshare in cloud, despite the calculations for both MAU and marketshare being very dubious and clearly omitting many many other cloud gaming providers. This is just wasted opportunity, you could have destroyed their numbers they used tp support a cloud SLC and you just let them pass. Outside of that, Microsoft failed to properly explain the limitations to cloud gaming, mainly the internet service providers and how that can be cost prohibitive, performance prohibitive, and makes scaling quickly globally now impossible.
Then we can talk about the deals. Microsoft just clearly didnt do enough here. They had a hurdle with the SLC and behavioral remedies, and they very clearly did not do all they could in order to make the agreement as all encompassing as possible. They only made a handful of agreements and they were all for buy to play services. They should have at th very least reached agreement with Luna to add variety. They should have also reached agreements with at least 1 of 2 cloud gaming providers that are headquartered in the UK, like how do you just miss on that opportuntity? Anyways, there are at least 10 other services that have substantial user populations today (over 100k), and they should have made a deal with each one. Ultimately there isnt much to lose by making their ecosystem more pervasive, and it makes their behavioral remedies much more robust and fuether builds a coalition of companies that would be vocal in support.
On top of that, Microsoft on several instances leaked to jounralists right before decisions what their strategies were, which clued in regulators and in some cases may have increased caution of Microsoft by regulators. Thats just careless and I would expect better from Microsoft and their team helping.
Letting arguments go and not going far enough for cloud remedies is unfortunately indicative of Microsoft not doing all they could to close this deal. This is disappointing because the stakes were very high and this impacts their ability to potentially acquire anyone in any industry that isnt just fully mature with no nascent possibilities in the future. They now face a future of uncertain growth opportunities because of a lack of attention/care, as well as effort in some cases.
Ultimately the decision by the CMA was irrational, but as I mentioned they could have done more up front to prevent such a decision or make it even more crazily obvious that it was irrational.
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I discussed this earlier. You would have to overturn the CMA’s proposition that ABK was going to licensed to cloud providers absent the merger.
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Yeah, I see, in that case the deals with the other providers wouldnt make much sense.
I hope MS gets the chance to propose something like this.
The comments on that article are delusional, they sound like those pro-Brexit nationalist.
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