Well, they do have that 10 year contract to service Flight Simulator. If they were purchased by Microsoft there wouldn’t be a need for such a contract. I think the relationship is as close as Playground Games was before they were acquired.
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If Sony manages to block this deal with their whining, then Xbox just needs to buy the Call of Duty IP from AB and make it exclusive. Then a year later buy ABK they would have nothing to complain about.
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I think if the Activision deal is blocked, a “scorched earth” microsoft isn’t going to be a Microsoft that decides to buy more publishers.
it’ll be a microsoft that looks to simply go on 2018 style buying sprees with independent developers. What will really be “scorched earth” about the notion of a scenario where the activision deal gets shutdown is the CMA basically forcing Microsoft to play Sony’s own game and absolutely flooding 3rd party publishers with money, marketing deals, and gamepass deals.
imagine what just a few billion dollars could do in that area, let alone tens of billions. Microsoft could price Sony out of those deals, with ease.
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@Hue Regarding Asobo, I totally agree, and I have always said MS want to get them but they want independence for now, so if they’re ever acquired I believe it’ll be MS. Asobo manage to have quality, efficiency, and versatility, very rare combination, reminds me of Respawn.
And about Crystal Dynamics, as sad as it makes me, I think if MS actually wanted them, they would’ve gotten them a while ago, they absolutely must’ve known Square wanted to sell them. But maybe MS would’ve considered the combined deal of CD + Eidos + IPs but Square only offered it during the MS-ABK thing and MS weren’t able to look into that deal when they’re all hands on deck with ABK, because that combined deal would’ve absolutely been too good to pass without reason, especially that it involves IPs. But oh well, not worth dwelling on that anymore (who am I kidding, I’ll always dwell on that deep down 
)
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They could, but that’s not their game. Their game is owning big content, to have exclusively on their subscription service. Not owning your content is a no-go in the subscription game. 3rd party deals would only be supplementary and temporary.
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Not sure if it should go here, but post games Xbox should money hat since the media and community have approved of it being fine.
I’ll go first:
Dragons Dogma 2 - year exclusivity allowing for extension like ff7.
Atlus project re fantasy - year if it’s still coming and not cancelled.
Mortal kombat or next nrs game.
One of EA upcoming marvel games
I mean, if regulators believe that there is no problem that sony gets final fantasy or silent hill exclusive, then there should not be any problem for xbox to buy sega, capcom or square
Because their ips arent even close to sell like cod, also xbox should be able to pay for excludivity of the big ips such as cod or fifa because apparently that doesnt affect the gamer but putting them on cod is “anticonsumer”
If this deal is blocked then xbox shouldnt go for small things and let sony buy everything
There is 0 legal basis on which ABK deal can be blocked. 0. Zero.
It can be only and only political move. But legally there is nothing that can stop the deal.
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Are you sure about that, because I am seeing more and more people saying that it could be blocked, or it will pass with a ton of concessions
People are saying nonsense all the time. It is Internet 
Concern trolling is a very popular activity online.
Real life is not better though 
Only market monopoly MS has is in windows install base in the market of PC hardware
In any other field i don’t think they cross even 40% in UK. Behind in console, behind in mau, behind console sold, revenue and what not.
I believe Amazon is still the biggest cloud provider in UK
Sony is doing cloud before Xbox
Microsoft is not even the 2nd or 3nd place via their store on Windows By itself owning OS is not a problem as Windows by itself does not limit other developers from making games on other platforms. Playstation itself is running some Linux fork.
It is similar to Google or Apple. Them owning Android and iOS is not a big deal. It becomes a big deal where they restrict other stores and other stuff.
All in all, legally - there is nothing that can be used against Microsoft. Even Sony is heavily pushing on COD and not on Windows.
I suppose, of course I am not going by the comments made in the console wars, I just want to hope that it will go through
The way CMA is behaving I won’t be surprised if simply having OS market share is enough to block this deal
Offcourse it is not but CMA is just…
CMA in Phase 1 is throwing all the possible concerns - in CMA Phase 2 they supposed to see which concern is realistic and which one is not.
Now that I think about, Apple is effective the legendary “WinTel” from 90s. Basically if in 90s Microsoft owned Intel, they would be like Apple at that time.
I could potentially see concessions, but I don’t see this deal being blocked unless something extraordinary happens.
Hoeg has even mentioned a couple of times that concessions are likely to happen since MS has been so forward about willing to be cooperative on keeping CoD multiplat and such.
Anyway, there’s an ABK thread for this stuff. Just don’t get buried alive in there.
Edit: also what the hell did I miss? Why are people suddenly getting console wary over billion/trillion dollar companies doing billion/trillion dollar company things? I get we’re on an Xbox focused site, but doesn’t mean we should be hoping for Sony to be killed. Y’all are better than this.
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I think owning major IP and devs Vs what Sony is doing with those IP you mentioned are very different things.
Microsoft has a preference towards the former, but legal battles might lead to them looking to the latter.
Console warring will make a comeback. It is easy to talk about not doing a console warring when one console dominates another one and another console lives in a different world. As long as the content of Playstation and Xbox intersects and they compete - console warring will return.
We see it right now across the internet. And it will become worse .
Console warring has never left, but I’d hope most of us have outgrown it (or at the very least are joking about it). Asking for the closure or large damage to another company isn’t a something a reasonable person should be spouting imo (and I don’t think that’s a controversial take).
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God’s existence is more probable than that 
We literally have execs in the companies stating that
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