The Federal Trade Commission’s request for an injunction stopping that acquisition heads toward opening arguments this week, the federal regulator cites one piece of what it calls “powerful evidence” that it can’t trust Microsoft’s assurances. In short, as the FTC puts it, “Microsoft’s actions following its 2021 acquisition of ZeniMax speak louder than Defendants’ words.”
I’m very happy that these agencies are blocking this acquisition. I had no faith they would.
There’s nothing good about the fourth largest video game publisher (third for first parties) acquiring the sixth largest (third for third parties). We need more variety, not more consolidation.
As a mainly Xbox gamer, that sucks, but understandable. Microsoft has tons of money and Xbox has bought up several studios and let them do small or not great games. I think the ZeniMax buyout sucks for PlayStation owners, but here I am waiting on playing FF and other games (which some eventually came out years later). If it’s 3rd party, I don’t think they (PS/Xbox) should be able to hold a game for longer than a year. StarField is an Xbox and PC release, that is the difference for me. If PS games released along side PC releases, I’d me more inclined to say it’s fine. We’ll see how it goes, I’m hoping that StarField will be great and M$ will notice and start investing more money and time into exclusives. Time will tell
Interesting. I’m against large companies buying up all these developers, but it seems strange that this is where they’re trying to draw the line.
Yeah, exclusives have been a part of the console business model since their inception, so it is odd that they’re just starting to look into this business practice now. Still, exclusives do need to die, so better late than never, I say.
I don’t think it’s necessarily that they’re drawing some kind of line on exclusives now. The issue is that Microsoft has pinky promised that if they buy Activision, that CoD at least (most likely other games as well) will NOT be Xbox exclusives. So that’s why Microsoft’s purchase of ZeniMax and then releasing a Xbox exclusive out of the deal shows that Microsoft’s pinky promise for Activision might not be as good as it seems.
Honestly, I hope the deal gets blocked. I am a slight Microsoft fan boy (and I really loved all of the ree’ing from PlayStation fan boys when it was first announced), but I really hate all of this buying and consolidation of companies, it really needs to stop. Let companies compete with each other.
So that’s why Microsoft’s purchase of ZeniMax and then releasing a Xbox exclusive out of the deal
Did they ever promise that ZeniMax games would not be exclusive? If so, then yeah, that’s pretty shitty.
but I really hate all of this buying and consolidation of companies, it really needs to stop.
Hear, hear!
I’m pretty sure they were super vague and shady with the language they were using when talking about that.
All this really does is seem to encourage the way Sony does business which is to just buy exclusivity agreements with third party studios. Both methods (buying established studios outright and buying exclusivity agreements) seem highly anticompetitive and bad for gamers overall.
Or they could nurture growing studios and develop new IP under their own management?
This argument could be made for any console exclusive. I’m not saying I support the acquisition.
