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kibwen

> This is just simply not true as a blanket rule.

It is, which is why the FTC needs to approve mergers.

> Buying Activision makes the console market more competitive

Why should the FTC care about the console market specifically rather than the gaming market in general?

> How does this reduce competition, and in what market?

The very notion of "console exclusives" reduces competition because it removes incentives to compete on hardware cost or quality and instead compete only on whatever IPs a company happens to own.

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> It is, which is why the FTC needs to approve mergers.

It isn't, which is why the FTC often approves mergers.

> Why should the FTC care about the console market specifically rather than the gaming market in general?

They should consider both.

> The very notion of "console exclusives" reduces competition because it removes incentives to compete on hardware cost or quality and instead compete only on whatever IPs a company happens to own.

Why is competing on hardware cost or quality more valid than competing on exclusive content? And if that's the rule, why is the company with better exclusive content, Sony, allowed to acquire more studios, like Bungie?

How is Sony holding their "first party games" (which were all made form company acquisitions, just years ago) from Xboxes not literally the same thing as M$ purchasing Activision and blocking them from PlayStations?

Both are 1) buying a game making company, 2) making a game, 3) withholding it from the competition.

Sony's purchases were generally smaller individual studios that didn't have big libraries of existing established IPs?

There doesn't seem to be many examples of them buying studios to take existing cross platform megahits exclusive.

Edit: They apparently bought Bungie recently? Wikipedia kinda doesn't include it in their list of PlayStation studios in a normal fashion so I missed it. I suppose that is buying a big IP in Destiny (in reaction to the MS-AB takeover?), although that's basically a 1 game studio (next to no-one is really going to care about Myth or Marathon), so it's still a fair bit smaller than the sort of stuff proposed with MS and A-B.

Most of the studios Sony bought were “2nd party” - i.e. they predominantly made games only for PlayStation. The effect on competing consoles was minimal - their game never made it to non-Sony consoles anyway; this was a different era where porting games was very painful since the hardware can vary radically between consoles.

It is the same thing. The biggest player (if you include Windows gaming) in the market gets treated differently than the second biggest player.

Many may not like it but it is not about what is fair, but what keeps the market healthy.

>if you include Windows gaming

But windows gaming isn't like console gaming. You don't have to pay license fees to microsoft to publish on windows - its a general purpose platform thats relatively open. It has nothing to do with the console market for you to count it except to purposely misrepresent the market.

You are having a different lens. If you focus on what Microsoft could do (enforce Apple like rules) not what they are doing right now you will understand the regulators better. It’s just about making sure the biggest player has competition.

> It is, which is why the FTC needs to approve mergers.

It would make Microsoft more competitive/powerful

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