6 ms·
Thank $deity someone did. Microsoft owning both the biggest platforms and the biggest publishers is a glaring example of what anti-trust regulations should exis
by paol 3y ago
Thank $deity someone did. Microsoft owning both the biggest platforms and the biggest publishers is a glaring example of what anti-trust regulations should exist to prevent.
Every anti-trust regulator in the world would have auto-blocked the merger after 5 minutes of examining the situation. Unfortunately actual anti-trust enforcement seems to have fallen entirely out of fashion.
- ricardobayes 3y agoDo you think this will actually have a good outcome for UK gamers? I can definitely foresee UK gamers not having access to products.
- tombert 3y agoI think I agree, but would this logic apply to Nintendo in the mid-80's? I think that (at least in the United States), the NES was probably the biggest game console, and Nintendo was almost certainly the biggest publisher for it.
- rprospero 3y agoNintendo was taken to court and forced to pay out over anti-competitive business practices. Granted, the specific charge was price fixing and the settlement of sending coupons to consumers was ridiculous, but I could imagine an FTC that wasn’t asleep at the wheel who split the company’s hardware and software divisions.
- edgyquant 3y agoNo, the industry was new and not worth close to what it is now. Plus a lot different, arcades we’re still pretty dominate at that time.
- reaperducer 3y agoI think I agree, but would this logic apply to Nintendo in the mid-80's? I think that (at least in the United States), the NES was probably the biggest game console, and Nintendo was almost certainly the biggest publisher for it. Maybe not at the beginning because home video games were new and different, and there was plenty of competition from Sega and Atari and others. But in a related note, Atari was forced to create a new company to publish some of its coin-op games to fend off monopoly accusations. (It later turned out to just be a shell game.)
- MikusR 3y agoMicrosoft is 3rd place on consoles, non-existent on pc, non-existent on mobile. And this deal would have moved it to 3rd place in publishing.
- paol 3y ago> non-existent on pc You may want to think a little longer on that ;)
- MikusR 3y agoSo should you.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y agoXbox has a digital marketplace on which game developers (sometimes a dreaded publisher) sell games and Microsoft gets a cut of the deal. Microsoft makes money because a game is sold on the Xbox digital marketplace. Microsoft has no (popular) equivalent to Steam, GoG, Epic Games Store, etc., and as such have no (popular) way of monetizing PC games sales. (As in, we're still talking about a games market and not an OS market. OP doesn't have to rethink their claim that MS is "non-existent on pc" because they practically are.)
- snapcaster 3y agoAs a MSFT shareholder I agree. As a citizen of the world I think it's fine to stop multi trillion dollar companies from expanding anymore regardless of impact and I think most reasonable people would agree
- AraceliHarker 3y agoIf you are a shareholder of MSFT, please tell them to stop making Windows 11 full of ads.
- samstave 3y ago
- reaperducer 3y agoThank $deity someone did. Microsoft owning both the biggest platforms and the biggest publishers is a glaring example of what anti-trust regulations should exist to prevent. I can't speak for the UK, but in the US, there are plenty of industries where the creator of a product is not also allowed to be the distributor of the product. Movie companies aren't allowed to own theaters. In most states, auto makers aren't allowed to own dealerships. Beer companies aren't allowed to own bars. The list goes on.
- anticensor 3y agoSoftware is not one of those industries.