Xbox and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Microsoft will have to jump through a lot of hoops to get the Activision/Blizzard deal over the line, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:but the latest FTC rulin🗹g was a big on🉐e - or perhaps a small one, since smaller hoops are harder to jump through. In any case, it was a significant obstacle for Xbox to overcome, but those celebrating are short-sighted. This is one of the biggest deals in both tech and entertainment history, but 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:PlayStation deciꦑded to put all 🉐of its eggs in one basket and, well, you know what they say about that.
Judge Corley oversaw the case, and called it "the largest in tech history". However, despite Corley's claims, it doesn't feel like it has been treated this way. He said in the ruling, "It deserves scrutiny. That scrutiny has paid off: Microsoft has committed in writing, in public, and in court to keep 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Call of Duty on PlayStation for 10 years on parity with Xbox," which gets right to the heart of the problem - t�💫�his should not have been about Call of Duty in the first place. Call of Duty is just one game, and while it makes a lot of mon⛎ey, Xbox's position has always been that it plans to profit oꦐff the game through sales and microtransactions, exactly as the game has always made its billions, rather than through exclusivity - a position that all of the evidence supported.
The ruling does also mention cloud gaming, but it reads like an afterthought, as it did throughout the case itself. The case was entirely around Call of Duty, and that meant the mountain Xbox had to climb was reduced to a molehill. It was also noted that the FTC's case relied too much on the testimony of Jim Ryan, a more biased witness you could not find without going to an Xbox Fell Over And Crushed My Cat support group. As PlayStation head, Ryan only appeared via video link up, and his case was blown apart by internal emails reassuring his꧂ team that Call of Duty would staꦚy on Playstation. Because the case was assembled to specifically be against Microsoft owning Activision (and even more spec♚ifically, Xbox ownin꧅g Call of Duty), rather than about the dangers of a company as big as Microsoft me🎶rging with a company as big as Activision, all Microsoft had to prove was that it would share Cal🍰l of Duty to get the whole deal cleared.
This is the part where I get accused of bias too. For many people, there are only two ways to look at this acquisition - you can either root for Sony and hope it fails, or root for Xbox and hope it succeeds. This won't be grounded in rational thinking over business monopolisation and conglomerisation, but instead by a simple preference. You've played Xbox all your life so you want Microsoft to win, or you've played PlayStation all your life so you want Sony to. You prefer Fable and Halo so you want Microsoft to win, or you prefer 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:God of War and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Last of Us so you want Sony to. You prefer green so you want Microsoft to win, or you prefer blue so you want Sony to. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:This footballificatܫion of gaming consoles was weird when it was just flaming each other on forums, and when ꧂$70 billion acquisitions are involved, it becomes dangerous꧙.
I believe 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Xbox buying Activision is a bad thing, not because of Call of Duty (or indeed any exclusives), but because Activision already has a habit of squeezing its smallest teams into the meat grinder of its most profitable games. All Xbox will do is provide more meat grinders. It not only shrinks the pool of games available for players and therefore the creative outlets for the artists who make them, it also shrinks the job pool. If you leave a studio because you don't like the way they do business or because you have been harassed or forced, your prospects are limited when the owners of t𒀰hat studio own the 17 others you might otherwise have gone to.
The dangers, for consumers, creatively, and for job prospects, are the real reason why the Activision deal is bad news. But 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Sony cannot raise that complaint because, as Xbox CEO Satya Nadella said during the trial, it was Sony who made these the rules of th🙈e game. Sony has enjoyed huge success over the past few generations due to being the place to go for prestige gaming experiences. If you want God of War, The Last of Us, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Spider-Man, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Ghost of Tsushima, Horizon, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Days Gone, and so many others, you want a PlayStation. Even during this acquisition case, Sony has kept up the trend, merging with Haven, Bungie, Right Stuff, Pixomon𓄧do, Firewalk, and more since Microsoft announced the Activision deal.
Sony is also solid proof of the concerns many hold for Xbox now - Sony has a specific formula that all of its trꦡiꦿple-A games are tied to, with 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:more experimental thinking left a🦂t the door. It's not going to abandon this formula - or stop acquiring studios and relying on triple-A exclusives - any time soon, so it could not make this the attack line. Instead it went after Call of Duty specifically, perhaps thinking that it was so well known beyond gaming it would win over less tech-savvy judges, or maybe belie🐠ving that Xbox would be caught in a lie about its pledge to keꦑep it on PlayStation. That proved to be a fatal mistake.
Xbox fans will celebrate, and PlayStation fans will console themselves that Sony has be🐽en keeping its big reveals back and will soon unfurl a bunch of upcoming games able to turn the tide once more. But this ruling is bigger tha𝓀n which colour console will have better games out by Christmas, or next summer, or 2025. This is a foundation shifting deal that makes it harder than ever for smaller studios to compete and limits opportunities for thousands of developers. We all lost this one.
