With how much push back with abk i personally think anything over 20B is off the table. This is not because of money but because of the pushback from ABK
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The pushback is just CMA being unreasonable with their “Sony theory of harm”. There is 0 legal basis on pushing back the deal.
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True, but it is perceived monopoly and certain regions may view it as such
Perceived by whom? Not a single regular can claim that there is any monopoly there. At all.
And with more gaming becoming crossplatform - like Warzone having crossprogression between PC, mobile and consoles - the market is even bigger and within 2-3 years you won’t be able to separate a mbile market from PC and consoles.
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It depends how you compare them, for example everyone who can potentially release a game and a platform holder are very different things.
You can make a monopoly from everything if you make a market small enough. Series S is a monopoly on consoles without a disk drive!
Yeah, it’s kinda silly. Platform and service holders have a much different market influence than game publishers.
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Not necessary. For example Tencent mainly publishes the games on PC and mobile. Do you discount it from the gaming market? I guess Tencent is not influential at all then…
Platform holders and service providers are gate keepers to a closed ecosystem. Of course they have different market impacts than the companies than publish within that closed ecosystem.
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But it does not mean that they are operating in a different gaming market. It is like CMA trying to make an argument that subscription services is a different market.
All these companies exist in the gaming market. PC is a whole set of “markets” or “platforms” that are stores. Each store is essentially its own platform.
I think studios and japanese publishers are more likely now, big publishers such as ea or t2 are off the table now
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T2 is not happening because sega is inevitable 
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After ABK, T2 is not really necessary.
Japan is a must though 
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After ABK I don’t think any western publishers are necessary, they already got the best western publisher with Bethesda and hopefully soon the biggest with ABK
Not only do they not need them but for me personally I don’t even care about the rest
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T2 are super meh to me outside of R*, Bioshock is cool but who knows how it’s future will be without Levine
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Ubisoft feel like a conveyor belt of pumping out the same soulless crap constantly, they will never get back to their prime ps2/rainbow six vegas days
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EA im kind of indifferent about too but anything of there’s I’m interested in comes to GP eventually anyway with EA Play
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Embracer has a tonne of IPs but the vast majority are smaller stuff which I guess would work well for GP but overall, I wouldn’t care too much about them joining Xbox
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Not sure what’s left other than some PC focused publishers which are basically irrelevant for me as I only play on console
It’s time to focus on Japan and elsewhere
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I’m unsure. If they go with a western publisher imo, it will be because of their mobile and pc presence.
Not that I think they would go after T2 but don’t they specialise in completely different things? I’m sure they would still want to fill those ‘gaps’.
E.g. what’s ABK’s equivalent of GTA, Red Dead, NBA, Mafia, Bioshock, WWE 2K, PGA or XCOM etc?
the thing is that with ABK, they literally cannot get higher with any other publisher whether it is PC on mobile. Literally nothing tops ABK.
- PC gives us the whole Blizzard (Warcraft, Starcraft and other games) + Activision (COD and other games)
- mobile gives us Candy Crush (and King level of presence), Diablo Immortal, COD Mobile, upcoming Warzone Mobile
Nothing tops that. Neither EA, nor T2, nor Ubisoft. Nor any other publisher. That’s why Microsoft will fight tooth and nail this deal as ABK aligns too perfect with their future plans on mobile especially.
The irony is that Sony is making the biggest deal with COD, while for Microsoft COD is just another (albeit very big) FPS IP 
We went through this discussion not once or twice even. And we both agreed to disagree.
But in short
- Microsoft has third person games in their pipeline. They can also make them if necessary. Sony for example has been doing similar games just fine.
- Bioshock is FPS/RPG (rings a bell?)
- my stance towards sports titles is well k nown
- Xcom style that did have Gears Tactics and have plenty of IPs that can have tactics game if necessary
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Didn’t Zynga make $2.8 Billion revenue in 2021?
King on the otherhand generated $2.5 Billion revenue in 2021.
Both are mighty impressive but Zynga appear to be growing/acquiring too, for example since 2021 Zynga have acquired 5 more mobile game studios.
ABK mobile consists of King (Candy Crush), Blizzard (Diablo Immortal) and Activision (COD mobile (partially published) and upcoming Warzone Mobile). That’s big. With ABK Microsoft gains top talent in mobile gaming.
I do wonder if Microsoft considered Zynga before ABK happened. We only know about Bungie.