Apparently, they said they still expect the merger to close by the end of Microsoft´s fiscal year (June 2023).
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It has been said a million times, all the talk right now is about phase 1 and going into phase 2.
Phase 1 talk = could this deal in ANY possible way have an impact
Phase 2 talk = will this deal have a SIGNIFICANT chance to impact the industry.
I highlighted the differences, of course we were going to hear all these concerns and ho hums about the deal when all they had to show is there could be a reason why the deal could impact the industry. Phase 2 they actually need to prove it and it has to show significant impact not just some impact it has to be a big impact in how companies compete.
I can’t stress enough I don’t think people put enough thought on what they have to prove when talking about this with a SLC ( significant lessening of competition) as it’s called. Significant is the magic word that people gloss over.
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Call CMA
Yet Zenimax only took 5 and a half months to complete, therefore did not clearly go through as much rigor with the regulators.
ABK is currently at month 10 and may be another 6-7 months!
This sounds like a PlayStation forum arguing over Call of Duty 
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Talking of PlayStation I assume Destiny isn’t a important IP as that only took 5 months also.
The point is a smaller acquisition wouldn’t have attracted nearly the same attention by the public, regulators or anyone else. The regulators also wouldn’t have likely investigated it so thoroughly (much like Zenimax).
Also as much as I love Sonic it’s a bit of a reach to compare it to the top selling game every single year 
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I wonder if MS actually expands the gap for a COD game into a three year per title instead with an expansion pack in between, so the studios can work on non COD games.
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I wouldn’t expect much for a while, the dumbest thing they could possibly do is right after it gets approved, go and mess around with support studios and how things have been running for the last decade.
The decoupling of studios will be over time, if it happens at all. This year gap is most likely a trial run to see how it’ll work. I don’t know if 12 extra months of dev time means they can rip out a ton of support studios just like that.
This process if it actually happens will take a while, I’m sure they’ll be asking what each team wants to do and move one off one by one very slowly.
Thanks for this!
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The studios are seemingly working on non-CoD stuff already (at least IW), but in general, I could see CoD scaled back. It helps GP long term and increases game quality.
Because - as it was suspected earlier - Sony did not complain about the deal.
It was discussed before but basically Sony did not care about Bethesda because - I stated multiple times - Bethesda by itself did not move the needle for Xbox or Game Pass. And Sony got the first 2 years of Bethesda moneyhatted anyway and by 2023 they would get a lot of games from other third parties not to care.
But ABK deal changes the whole gaming landscape. It is not “just brings the games on Game Pass”, it literally decimates the whole Sony’s position in the western market, completely destroying their whole foundation they have built the previous gen.
As they stated they had 1000s of documents. ABK is basically three publishers at once - Activision, Blizzard and King.
Nobody complained about Bungie that’s for sure.
Regulators did not consider sales an important metric. It was all about network effects, foreclosure and so on. The fact is that the market leader with 2+ times bigger market share made some regulators believe that it can die without a single IP due to network effects, exclusive content and so on is crazy.
They are not arguing about even losing access to COD, it is about not having “Playstation advantage”. And the deal being blocked due to that will embolden Sony enough to complain about any other deal that Microsoft might do if it affects playstation. And they will use the same argument and Microsoft won’t be able to argue otherwise as the precedent will be set.
Nobody thought that Microsoft would buy another publisher.
It’s not quite that black and white. If Sony’s arguments hold water, it’s because CoD’s position is deemed an industry “anomaly”. There is a reason Sony is not arguing in regards to Overwatch, WoW, Crash, Spyro or really any other title in the catalogue. There’s a reason Bethesda went through with flying colours.
At a certain point, it sets a bad precedence for them as well, given their intent to purchase/expand and moneyhat.
Now, if MS loses, the concern might be a ruling preventing them from buying, but those are rare. Most firms have made major alternative acquisitions within 1-2 years of a regulatory block.
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If mergers are going to be based off how big the IP is and Sony manages to convince them all that COD is so big and important than any other IP on the market, wouldn’t that just mean easy pickings for every other company. It’ll look a bit funny if they say go buy Take Two and go wait a minute GTA is too big as well nothing competes with it and so on.
If all that happens EA/Ubisoft are slam dunks and most of the JP publishers.
I mean, CoD MAUs are among the highest in the business. 10 of the top 20 best selling games of the last decade were CoD. I still don’t think there is a competitive concern here, but if Elder Scrolls , Minecraft and Destiny which were top 20 was considered “Not a concern for input foreclosure”, anything not GTA/Sports shouldn’t be a problem.
Sony is aware that they cannot afford big acquisitions on the same level as Microsoft, but they know that they can leverage their market share and it is always hard to get the market share from the market leader without big splashes of money like acquisitions.
Sure, just like Sony I am exaggerating but the idea of the market leader to decide what is allowed based on the idea that it can affect its bottom is a very bad precedent.
But MAU does not mean much because we have Genshin Impact and FF14 with big MAUs on PS and they are not on Xbox and it is not a problem.
Sorry, it shouldn’t be a problem in general. And yeah, the precedence would be an overly novel theory of harm and Sony does utilize their marketshare often. But I don’t think a precedence that CoD is too big necessarily precludes other acquisitions.
It’s not extra 12 months because there’s the rotation for the three studios, so instead of 3 years of dev, it is being internally planned as 6 years in this new change, but going even further would means 9 years, therefore there would be like two CODs per gen and the studios would do one game and one non COD game in this timeframe, so it could be two different games for the generation by each studio.
While I think we are all expecting the EU to go to phase 2 here a link to the site (I think) they’ll update with their verdict.
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