Microsoft / Activision Deal Leaves Sony Stans in Shambles | M$ Wins Fight Against FTC

[Pull Up the Roots]

Should give them enough time to make their own COD competitor

Sounds like the CMA did a thorough job here.

 

[Gizmo_Duck]

Sounds like the CMA did a thorough job here.

Yep, xbox stans don’t gotta like it but thats one of the downsides to consuming all your information in a bubble. Listening to youtube lawyers and shills with heavy xbox bias.

People like Hoeg Law made a lot of money off these guys

 

[ORDER_66]

So what happens now???

 

[Gizmo_Duck]

So what happens now???

EU decision is in a week or two

But ultimately they appeal against the CMA, which could take another 18 months to reach another decision, but it goes through competition appeal tribunal where they decide if there was a misjudgement by the CMA, but ultimately even if it is ruled in Microsofts favor it will get kicked back to the CMA and they will most likely make the same decision again.

Meanwhile they have to go to court with the FTC in the US to fight them.

They also have to renegotiate the terms of the merger with Activision in July. Activision is worth far more now than they were when Microsoft first offered to buy them due to all the legal trouble they were in back then. So Kotick will most likely up the price by then also.

Either way, the longer they draw this out the more expensive it gets, and it probably still won’t make a difference. the deal is effectively dead unless they can get the CMA to agree on it, which means they have to do significant divesture of one of the studios or IP

 

[ORDER_66]

EU decision is in a week or two

But ultimately they appeal against the CMA, which could take another 18 months to reach another decision, but it goes through competition appeal tribunal where they decide if there was a misjudgement by the CMA, but ultimately even if it is ruled in Microsofts favor it will get kicked back to the CMA and they will most likely make the same decision again.

Meanwhile they have to go to court with the FTC in the US to fight them.

They also have to renegotiate the terms of the merger with Activision in July. Activision is worth far more now than they were when Microsoft first offered to buy them due to all the legal trouble they were in back then. So Kotick will most likely up the price by then also.

Either way, the longer they draw this out the more expensive it gets, and it probably still won’t make a difference. the deal is effectively dead unless they can get the CMA to agree on it, which means they have to do significant divesture of one of the studios or IP

Another 18 months?!!? I hope Nutella just tell phil to drop this acquisition because its costing them alot to fight it... but that's just me...

 

[ALonelyDad]

Phil Spencer:

 

[TripleAgent]

Ultra gay.






Him AND you

 

[Rekkapryde]

Should give them enough time to make their own COD competitor

Jesus

 

[iceberg_is_on_fire]

Having not weighed in fully in this. I still don't think it's a certainty that this is done.

The CMA tries to say that in 10-15 years, this will happen or that will happen, in a hypothetical sense.

However, the Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) says this.

Assessment of impairment to dynamic competition will almost always involve consideration of expectations (i.e. an outcome with a more than 50% chance). Clearly, that outcome will involve consideration of multiple factors, but we doubt very much (although of course every case must turn on its facts) if an impairment to dynamic competition that is not thought to manifest itself within five years at the outside can be considered to be an expectation. The world is simply not that predictable.

A cloud gaming provider reached profitability in 2022, having started in 2019; expects cloud gaming being common in a decade (page 201)

Another provider [REDACTED] submitted that it had reached profitability in 2022 having started operating in 2019, although this excludes hardware expenses. It stated that it has high capital expenditure due to hardware investments, and that a hardware solution with efficient balance between cost and performance is key to profitability in cloud gaming. This provider also stated that cloud gaming will be the main way users access gaming content in 7-10 years.

That's outside the purview that CAT has given the CMA to go by in terms of time and not one of you here think that this is going to be the last generation of hardware from either Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo.

(d) [REDACTED] stated that is likely that cloud gaming services will grow especially in markets with free fast internet access and low console penetration. It noted that in the UK 'machine gaming' (ie on console or PC) is most popular as there is no latency. It described cloud gaming as being early in its life cycle, and that as a rough guess it could be 10-15 years before cloud gaming replaces consoles.

See, all of these companies are all over the place with their projections of when the cloud is supposed to take off but the CMA, a group of people is going to know the industry better than the industry people? Also, that's outside of consideration for 5 years too.

The CMA ultimately took every conceivable hypothetical and weighed it against Microsoft. I'm not saying that Microsoft is going to ultimately win anything, but I do believe that the CMA is going to have to revisit a lot of this because CAT will rule in Microsoft's favor in a large degree.

The entire argument is that Activision makes Microsoft's cloud business unbeatable, mainly off the strength of Call of Duty, which is patently absurd. That is the CMA's single theory of harm. WiiU had COD, sold 10 million. Switch doesn't have COD, sold over 100 million. CMA is going to have to answer for a lot of these answers is what I think.

 

[High quality poster]

Having not weighed in fully in this. I still don't think it's a certainty that this is done.

The CMA tries to say that in 10-15 years, this will happen or that will happen, in a hypothetical sense.

However, the Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) says this.





That's outside the purview that CAT has given the CMA to go by in terms of time and not one of you here think that this is going to be the last generation of hardware from either Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo.



See, all of these companies are all over the place with their projections of when the cloud is supposed to take off but the CMA, a group of people is going to know the industry better than the industry people? Also, that's outside of consideration for 5 years too.

The CMA ultimately took every conceivable hypothetical and weighed it against Microsoft. I'm not saying that Microsoft is going to ultimately win anything, but I do believe that the CMA is going to have to revisit a lot of this because CAT will rule in Microsoft's favor in a large degree.

The entire argument is that Activision makes Microsoft's cloud business unbeatable, mainly off the strength of Call of Duty, which is patently absurd. That is the CMA's single theory of harm. WiiU had COD, sold 10 million. Switch doesn't have COD, sold over 100 million. CMA is going to have to answer for a lot of these answers is what I think.

We don’t care what you think

 

[iceberg_is_on_fire]

We don’t care what you think

Yet you felt compelled to quote. Thanks for being in the fan club.

 

[daze23]

reading through that summery on resetera is crazy. it really does seem like the CMA started with a conclusion, and worked backwards to justify it. the majority of their reasoning is just some hypothetical slippery slope shyt

 

[Gizmo_Duck]

CMA is going to have to answer for a lot of these answers is what I think.

To whom?

 

[iceberg_is_on_fire]

reading through that summery on resetera is crazy. it really does seem like the CMA started with a conclusion, and worked backwards to justify it. the majority of their reasoning is just some hypothetical slippery slope shyt

With all of the vetted lawyers on Resetera, all saying the same thing too. I truly believe that the CMA worked from no and tried to make it fit. In terms of a vertical integration, stripping away the names, this is a paint by numbers case, easy to do in your sleep. Its also hard to say cloud choice when both Nvidia and Boosteroid have come out in favor of Microsoft AFTER the ruling. Their ruling is very flawed, to the point of batshyt asinine because their methodology isn't consistent. The only thing that was consistent was that, we don't believe Microsoft is going to _________.

The final report uses fuzzy, nebulous math and hypotheticals to reach their conclusion. We've seen multiple countries approve this unconditionally, we've seen multiple cloud gaming companies say they support this deal and we have now seen multiple analysts, post ruling, say this conclusion by the CMA makes no sense whatsoever.

Everyone has the same data here. Something isn't adding up right in addition to their faulty math. Nobody in this thread or any thread of its kind on any message board on the internet or real life, on January 18, 2022 when news of this acquisition broke, said, "Oh shyt, I wonder what is going to happen to GeForce Now, Ubitus or Boosteroid? It was about Sony and only Sony. To end up here, after all of this is utterly ridiculous to say the least.

https://finance-yahoo-com.cdn.amppr...icrosoft-activision-deal-could-192626269.html

DAVE BRIGGS: What do you make of the argument from the UK, Microsoft has a strong position in cloud gaming services and the evidence available to the CMA showed that Microsoft would find it commercially beneficial to make Activision's game exclusive to its own cloud gaming service? That was not the original objection we heard much about. What do you make of this argument?

MARTIN YANG: Yeah, this argument is valid at face value, but in terms of real impact to the gamers and to competition, it's immaterial. UKCMA essentially proposed a argument that Microsoft will find very, very hard to refute, because the cloud gaming market is so small. And there's no valid data out there that will showcase putting exclusive games on Microsoft's own cloud gaming service hurts competition. There's simply not enough data points.

https://www.ft.com/content/e60a973f-43ab-4257-a7de-28017a94ac0a

The decision has left the opposing sides disputing the impact of the deal on a market that barely exists."

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.ho...ofts-activision-blizzard-deal-1235402952/amp/

For Microsoft and Activision, we suspect the CMA decision is a deal-killer," SVB Securities Research analyst Clay Griffin argued in an April 26 investor note.

At best, Griffin sees the Competition Appeal Tribunal in the U.K., to whom Microsoft will now scramble to overturn the ruling, confirming the CMA's concerns for the takeover deal on competition grounds. "We won't spill much more ink on the faulty logic throughout the CMA's analysis. Or why 'cloud gaming' isn't ready for prime time and is almost certainly going to be a vector of competition between Sony-Microsoft-Nintendo and not a distinct market. What's the point?" Griffin wrote.






In terms of looking back at my accounting books, this deal is essentially the textbook definition of a vertical integration but yet we ended up here.

 

[iceberg_is_on_fire]

To whom?

They will have to defend when the appeal goes live in front of CAT.