Goronmon @ Goronmon @kbin.social

Posts

73

Comments

108

Joined

2 yr. ago

...it’s really hard to see how that isn’t going down the road of ‘might makes right’ for consolidation in a lot of industries so long as you’ve got the money.

I don't see at as "might makes right" but that blocking mergers in these types of situations is effectively protecting the market leader from competition. Which is the opposite of the goal for things like anti-trust issues.

Games during the NES/SNES era were $50+. Are you saying games now cost $150+ dollars? Or are you just in a region where inflation/currency has made prices shift more than in the US?

One if the comments under the main post is about gaming having died a decade ago and now we are just in the age of decline.

These types of comments remind me of that Douglas Adams quote.

“In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”

If there has been anything I've seen in the last 30+ years of gaming, it's that people always think games used to be much better.

Yeah, in no version of how this played out was he going to not receive hundreds of millions of dollars. That was never an option.

None of what you said explains how Microsoft today (not 15 years ago, or in some hypothetical future) will have a monopoly before or after this acquisition.

By allowing MS to do this the courts are signing to the world that smaller companies shouldn’t even bother competing because they can never outspend MS’s war chest.

Which company would you have expected to compete in the console space in the foreseeable future that will have changed their minds because of this acquisition? I'm not aware of any, but I wouldn't mind being shown that this is a real concern.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/11/23791149/microsoft-activision-blizzard-uk-regulators-cma-appeal

It's hard to argue that a company can be a monopoly in an industry when they are third place in that industry (and still will be after said acquisition).

Microsoft have been acquiring huge companies (Bethesda, for example), hit games (Minecraft), and key development parters from competition (remember Rare?) from the beginning of Xbox.

And yet, they are still in third place in the gaming market behind Sony and Nintendo. If those acquisitions didn't turn Microsoft into a monopoly already, what will be significantly different if they acquire AVB?

The issue in this instance is that's its hard to prove that a company not even close to leading to the market is going to somehow dominate that market through a single (albeit large) acquisition.

Stands for Marxism–Leninism.