Xbox is a platform holder and a service provider, the competition being impacted is that group not every company that makes games.
None of the other publishers care that much about these acquisitions because they don’t have a direct on their business. There is a reason Sony was the one complaining and EA wasn’t.
The console business is hardly the market that anyone cares about and will be a niche market in the next 10 years. Its already a small slice of the overall gaming market. Yes google is a significant mobile publishing. They also run a game subscription service.
When Xbox talks about the video game market changing, they are right. People have been blind to it so far, but all of the major big tech companies have begun successfully to both wade into and disrupt the traditional gaming market.
Subscription services that you present is a much more interesting area to discuss from a regulatory body persepctive and where I can absolutely see there being some difficulties with TT or EA. Particularly EA as they have a successful game subscription service.
Take 2 on the other hand is a very diverse company in terms of gaming overall. They do not offer an abundance of concern to regulators in my opinion, particularly if GTA is kept as multiplatform. I could even see Xbox agreeing with regulators to not use GTA as a gamepass incentive to push it through.
Lets remember that Microsoft is ultimately looking to diverse content to reach 3 billion gamers. Additionally they are looking to steer the direction of the metaverse. They would have plenty of incentive to make some concessions that dont even really hurt their goals and would lead to the deal going through.
Microsoft should buy publishers until governing bodies force them not to.
Then they should buy large independant developers until governing bodies force them not to.
They they should buy indie studios and start recruiting for self built AAA teams until governing bodies force them not to.
Limits be damned
Another factor to consider is that the ABK acquisition is not expected to close until March of next year so basically over a year. EA or Take Two I would imagine would take much longer possibly 2-3 years(especially with sorting through all the sports licenses) since Microsoft would be in a much more dominant position than they would have been prior to acquiring ABK.
Well that’s a take
I don’t really like the broad gaming market that we use in these discussions because there is more nuance than that. There are different roles being played, some companies with multiple hats and different competitions going on.
I’m not going to be like the crazy folks and break it down by genre, but there are at least three distinct areas of competition.
Platform Holders
Service Providers
Game Producers
Excessive acquisitions by folks in group 1 and 2 will 100% impact competitiveness in those group. Group 3 is mostly not impacted, until group 2 grows so big that not buying games is normalized. Hopefully we at least agree on that.
Admittedly, Facebook is a platform holder but they are very VR centric which is not even an area that Xbox is competing.
It’s not that simple. If the ABK acquisition fails Microsoft would have to pay out 3 billion. You also are wasting precious time risking testing the government rather than acquiring things that would be needed and benefit Microsoft as a whole.
Microsoft should just buy everybody… fucking hell.
Take the fanboy goggles off, stop getting into stupid Twitter wars about exclusives and aquisitions and try to remember what gaming was like before this stupid fucking aquisition season ever started.
Once ABK closes, which it will - next year Xbox is going to have over 30 internal studio’s and about 20k employees across gaming. Completely dwarfing any and all competitors. More studios, more games, best hardware, best services are all already in the bag.
Get a real It is not enough merely to win, others must lose vibe everytime i pop into this thread.
Although I agree it must stop somewhere, I must point out that Ubisoft on its own has 20,745 employees according to Statista.
All it takes is for one large corporation to come in like Apple and Amazon and they could easily do similar deals to outgrow Xbox in its current form (by employees, revenue and number of studios). As a business you want to protect your investments from scenarios like these.
The fact that Tencent and Sony will still have more gaming revenue even after ABK, shows how far Xbox (MS) have had to come just to catch up.
Worse case scenario is some titles they might be forced (repeat :forced) to keep cross platform to get these deals over the finish line …either way superior versions free on gamepass is better then nothing!
I am pretty sure that the acquisitions that Microsoft does are “needed” and “benefit” Microsoft. It is not like Microsoft is buying just random stuff 
ABK deal is more important than 10-20 smaller studio acquisitions combined. It is more important than any Japanese publisher, more important than Asobo, CE, IO, Avalanche etc.
Ubisoft are an anomaly and definitely an outlier.
PlayStation has around 10k. Nintendo has around 5k. EA has around 13k. Take-Two has around 8k. Square Enix has around 4k. Capcom has around 3k. Sega has around 3k.
Now could Apple or Amazon swoop in and buy a couple of these publishers? Maybe, but what does that mean? Would they release their own hardware, go streaming only, does everything goes exclusive or everything stays multiplatform? There’s too many variables and uncertainties that nobody should really be concerned about one of them entering the gaming industry for real, especially when we can already see what Tencent, Sony, Epic, Take-Two, EA are doing in this space with acquisitions and mergers. And although Sony and Tencent would be ahead of Xbox on revenue generated i dont expect it to stay that way for too long, we still dont know how the market will react to everything on Game Pass and what kind of shift in revenue that will actually cause.
There has never ever been a better time to be invested in the Xbox ecosystem and its only going to get better from here on out. Microsoft and Xbox have a clear and defined vision for what they want Xbox to be and as it will be a disruptor to the norm, everything is up in the air as to how that affects the others.
Buying more publishers just doesn’t make sense on so many levels, single studio’s? Absolutely, but i think we need to reign in the infatuation with pubs, just a bit.
Yeah, but it is funny considering that Tencent entered the market later. However Tencent started with mobile and stuff like Riot Games so it gets a lot of revenue. Especially since the growth of mobile market started.
Phil Spencer just said last week that the acquisitions are not stopping after ABK closes. This is not the first time he has said it either. He’s now the CEO of Microsoft Gaming. Not sure who else needs to say it for it to ring true to you.
Ubisoft 3.8B market cap talk about bang for your buck🤔
I agree with most, if not all of your points.
Ubisoft are definitely an exception, but the fact they are just shows it is possible for Xbox to be outgrown in headcount relatively easily.
I also agree there’s never been a better time to be invested in the Xbox ecosystem and we wont know the full effects of the ABK acquisition until years into the future.
There’s also many studios I personally would prefer they acquire over a publisher (and/or ABK).
I guess my counter argument is they ultimately need to protect their investments by staying competitive, I think it’s clear why Xbox state the tech giants are their competitors and why they also mentioned Tencent again at TGS.
Sure there’s alot of variables and unknowns but imagine if Apple, Google or Amazon brought up a number of the big publishers like EA, TakeTwo, Embracer & Bamco (or even Sony) then proceeded to create their own subscription service which undercut Xbox in price.
In this hypothetical situation it could become the leading subscription service, which in turn puts people off subscribing to GamePass because the games they want to play are on this other subscription service (and they can’t afford multiple subscriptions), therefore it ultimately depreciates Xbox’s investments (and could make their games less popular - due to availability).
This would have a massive impact on Xbox and their games (investments) as they are potentially loosing a subscriber to their competitor. This would also put their near 100 Billion gaming investments in question with their shareholders.
With the amount of money they’ve been investing they almost can’t afford to be at risk of being overshadowed by these tech giants or even smaller competitors, therefore I personally see them continuing with publisher acquisitions to ensure that this risk is minimised, especially if their competitors continue to make moves (which they will). Also I think it is clear that Xbox’s stance is that they will continue to invest/acquire.
Again just to reiterate outside of perhaps SEGA or UBISOFT there’s plenty more studios I would have preferred they target over publishers, it’s just my view that Xbox would do this.
I was joking about it reaching CDPR but I guess it has the potential to fall that low.
What I find fascinating is that a lot of folks are afraid that Xbox and Game Pass might become the leading services…
Isn’t someone buying up the market and making it impossible for competitors to enter one of the very things that regulators are supposed to protect against?
It is but, regulators need to find a solid proof that actions limit the ability of new entrants. Like you don’t need to own a cloud infrastructure to build a leading service (Netflix, Disney), and you don’t need to own a platform to be a successful (Tencent), you don’t need to publish a lot of games to be successful (Minecraft, Roblox).
One of the challenges that the regulators have is that they don’t have clairvoyance - they cannot know what will happen in the future. Imagine them blocking Netflix 15-20 years ago because Blockbuster complained. Or imagine them blocking digital stores like Steam because GameSpot complained. Or imagine them prohibiting Disney from launching Disney+ because they own too many IPs with a cult following.
And the most notable example - no matter how much monopoly Facebook had with Facebook + Instagram + WhatsApp - we got Telegram, gigantic TikTok and other communication tools that appeared out of nowhere. Hell, even Google is declining.
I’m honestly surprised Google (iirc) didn’t make much of a stink about the ABK deal when they stated the Zenimax acquisition basically ended their want to internally develop games anymore.
Like I get they’re not really competing on the first party front anymore, but still.