I mean you sound sure about it but from these companies perspective, why even attempt to compete with the first to market megacorp that already has a leg up, just put your stuff on their service. Competing is not easy and would be even less so under the circumstances that by the way might still happen without ABK. In Phil's own words, the deal is an accelerant but not necessary for their plans.
Most likely. Right now they claim that cloud gaming is a seperate market yet use numbers that are an extension of the console/pc market as the user base.
The CMA answers you question in their paperwork. They say even if the 60-70% isn't fully correct they still believe that there is a very high probability that this deal would give MS a great deal of power. They are legally allowed to make estimations and predictions on the way the market is going to develop. Even if there is some small disputes in the underlying numbers they are still allowed to look to the future to determine a risk. I think people are focusing to much on the number estimates when everyone admits the market as it is now is not a direct correlation to how it will be then. The CMA can only be overruled if they made procedural mistakes, legal mistakes, or irrational decisions.
Last I saw they were saying Cloud is going to become a separate market not that it is right now. They are looking into the future and trying to guess using the data they have been given which probably includes MS's own projections for the Cloud's growth and expansion.
Is there any historical examples where CAT appeal got accepted over procedural mistakes? I'm just interested to hear what kind of procedural errors could have happened. The other 2 options for an appeal just seem like dead ends imo.
Because that's the law and if you want to operate as a transatlantic organisation in the U.K. you have to follow the rules and regulations that goes with it.
Because it wouldn't have been just selling the COD IP, it would have been selling the whole business that is required to make COD, which is basically every Activision studio. In this instance where they would have been required to divest COD, they basically would be buying all the non-COD Activision IPs, maybe Toys For Bob and one of the other studios depending on how much they contributed to the recent COD games, Blizzard and King.
They wouldn't have just sold the IP. Part of the divestment would require everything needed for COD to release as it did before. So any divestment of COD would have included the entire mechanism including all of the studios. That's why the second option was for the Divestment of Activision entirely. The third option was Activision and Blizzard. All of those options were included because of the fact that ABK uses resources throughout the combined company to keep COD releasing on schedule.
Because Disney would've own most if not all of the Regional Sport Networks which they sold to Bally Sports. That is a far cry of what's happening here. Even after the merger, Disney is the third in video streaming by subscribers. I'm not sure that comparison is apples to apples and if it is it does nothing to argue against this case.
And those would very likely be dependent on the EC decision in the next few weeks. If the EC approves the deal, I guess it will depend on how lenient or restrictive they remedies would be to help their argument.
One of the CMA's points is that yes, MS Windows does indeed stand to become a monopoly OS in cloud gaming servers, should this merger go ahead. They already command an extremely high percentage of OS use in gaming PCs, and naturally this extends to server OS for game streaming at the moment with Windows being by far the most popular choice. Google tried Linux with Stadia, which obviously worked very well technically - but was very tough to persuade developers to port to it, especially in a timely manner. Of course, then MS purchased the owner of Google's best technical partner ID, and big supporter Bethesda, and immediately took them and their support off the table.
Not according to the CMA. Th etheory of harm was solely based on Activision content being important to cloud gaming , and Microsoft would have an incentive to foreclose access. They stated that prior existing assets (azure/windows/infra) do not inform the theory of harm because Microsoft has those with or without ABK.
Its hard to not be when the other OS that has a huge install base doesnt take gaming seriously.
It was less than 10 minutes before the announcement. But I haven't seen anything since I actually noticed it and mentioned here. Definitely should be an investigation though as that was very blatant.
This is something that very likely won't change even with ABK being independent. There's little to no incentive for ABK to port their games to Vulkan, just like other devs on Stadia because the user base wasn't there. As for Proton, that's a lot of what ifs and speculation which are never a good legal argument.
No, it was an extremely sharp drop after the stock was stable minutes before, heck an hour earlier the pre market stock was actually positive. Just 8 minutes before the press release it suddenly dropped. There's 0 doubt there was insider trading, that or CMA released it a few minutes early somewhere.
That's when I happened to wake up. I figured I'd check ATVI's price, as that would be the fastest way to see what happened. When I saw it down 6% I knew either the deal was blocked or had such untenable conditions it was likely over, but I couldn't find any news yet because of course it wasn't public.
Nope. It was a sudden sharp drop minutes before the news went public, which afaik was due some time that day. Clear leak.
The FTC can do their job, and their job is to follow established laws and not ideals. Now, if the law needs to change, so be it. Just because the CMA has no oversight doesn't mean they get to play world police for M&A.
Yeah the drop was super sus, I was on tradingview watching live at the time too.
That I consider quite normal. If it were approved, the stock would jump higher and likely never return lower, so it's normal price action imo. OTOH if it goes down, it may recover in a month or year. It is possible that some big players wanted a move up so they could sell some or hedge more though, but I doubt that was a big influence.
It wasn't in reference to the CMA, but the FTC streak of trying to go above the law and power.
Not hard to make a decision when you dont have a way of being taken to court properly.
Hang on you think a structural remedy of divestment is only a UK affecting solution?
GCP, AWS and Azure is fundamentally different than having cables and infra that distribute media and internet. Microsoft has APIs, SDKs and applications outside of just the hardware that these telecoms don't have for cloud computing... not just cloud gaming.
