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> They have a "monopoly" with their key franchises, most notably CoD and WoW. I don't follow, even in the air quotes monopoly context. Could you elaborate? I
by robinsoh 5y ago
> They have a "monopoly" with their key franchises, most notably CoD and WoW.
I don't follow, even in the air quotes monopoly context. Could you elaborate? I thought anyone can make a game, even that specific type of game and reach a paying audience quickly if it is good. Aren't the game engines for CoD and WoW actually owned by different companies? Eg: Unreal Engine is owned by Epic/Tencent.
- karatinversion 5y agoI guess they have a legal monopoly on their intellectual property? But I do see a lot of sloppy uses of the word monopoly that just seem to be autopilot.
- regularfry 5y agoThere was no need for inverted commas in the GGP post. Intellectual property is precisely a government-granted monopoly under specific rules. Nobody else can make a Call of Duty game: they have a monopoly on the market for Call of Duty games.
- Armisael16 5y agoYeah, but having a monopoly over their own IP isn’t in any way noteworthy. I took the scare quotes to mean that they had pseudo-monopoly in the broader space (WoW -> MMORPG, CoD -> console FPS). I’m not sure I agree with them, but stating that they have a monopoly over their own IPs is so obvious and uninteresting that I find it hard to believe that’s what they were going for.
- regularfry 5y agoIt's interesting in the sense that as a consumer of CoD games, you're not getting any innovation from Activision. You're just getting a new bottle every couple of years. Compare that to Apple, where arguably you're not just getting a new bottle: if you're in the ecosystem, you're getting an M1, air pods, a watch, lidar on your phone, the opportunity to spend 3 figures on a "pencil", whatever. Very different approaches.