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For months now, Microsoft has sworn up and down that it has no interest in making Call of Duty exclusive to the Xbox if and when its proposed $69 billion Activision acquisition is approved. But as the FTC'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."
[...]
Rather than focusing on what it calls a "strained analogy" to ZeniMax, Microsoft would prefer the court look at Microsoft's purchase of Minecraft-maker Mojang, which has continued to publish the game on a variety of platforms after becoming part of Microsoft. This is a better analogy for Call of Duty, Microsoft writes, because Minecraft was similarly "an existing, multi-player, cross-platform franchise like COD."
[...]
Call of Duty is unlike Minecraft, the FTC argues, in part because Minecraft is available in largely the same form on mobile phones, tablets, and the Switch. "Even if Microsoft took Minecraft off of rival consoles and subscription and cloud gaming services, it would still be available for play on many other devices. The context for Call of Duty is very different."Regardless, the FTC also argues that this manufactured categorization doesn't matter, because Microsoft's exclusivity decision applied to "all future ZeniMax games." While Microsoft said in 2021 that "some" future Bethesda games would be Xbox exclusives, no Bethesda non-exclusives have been announced since then.
Previously:
US Moves to Block Microsoft's Activision Takeover - 20230613
Microsoft and Activision Will Miss Their Contractual Merger Deadline - 20230115
FTC Moves to Block Microsoft's Activision Acquisition - 20221209
The Biggest Deal in Gaming is Under Fire From U.S. Senators - 20220403
Related:
Microsoft Acquires ZeniMax Media and Bethesda Softworks for $7.5 Billion - 20200921
(Score: 2) by boltronics on Tuesday June 27 2023, @02:02PM
Except these days, games take many years and many millions of dollars to compete at the level of COD. Splitting off and competing is no longer so easy.
In the old C&C days we had Dark Reign, Total Annihilation, StarCraft and a ton of others. These days nobody's making them. EA did test the waters a couple of years back with some simple remasters which were great IMO, but even then, probably not enough return on investment. Too hard to do microtransactions for the genre. Grey Goo wasn't a big seller either AFAIK.
Hence, Westwood likely wouldn't have survived anyway. Sierra is a similar story. Look at Telltale, the modern equivalent in many ways. Attempts at bringing Descent back have also all met little success, despite being a mega success back in the day.
And yet, Need For Speed is still selling well all this time. I had the first game on MS DOS back in the day, and beat Unbound on my Xbox just recently, despite being owned by EA. It doesn't hurt that EA bought up other racing game developers like Codemasters, but makes you wonder how much blame can really be attributed to being bought Vs gaming trends.
Another example: Final Fantasy 16. What was a turn based JRPG is now just a fast-paced real-time action game, because Square Enix felt they had to adapt to modern trends to keep the franchise alive.
COD is one of those special franchises like NFS that has proven itself be able to stand the test of time without changing the core gameplay into something unrecognisable.
It's GNU/Linux dammit!